this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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and 3 years later they'll end the support.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
This was the original cyberpunk-transhumanist message. Not "cybernetics will destroy your soul" but "corporations own your body, or worse parts of your body"
That's a new hell-on-eath I wasn't aware of. Yikes.
A good argument for open source
I love my FLOSS penis
So, soft-ware?
Sometimes it's hardware
Schrödinware
Occasionally just firmware.
And even if open source doesn't fit their business model for any reason, there should be regulations that force these companies to open source everything in any situation that they stop offering support.
I've meditated about this a while now! Imagine the amount of electronic waste produced by planned obsolescence! You have a phone, TV, car and much more that could be diagnosed, repaired and reused for same or all different use cases.
All those phones that still are running LineageOS perfectly fine that could be used by the elderly who need not have much more than basic communication.
Terrifying. No government bailout for improving people's life quality...
No, they're far too busy using taxpayer money to bail out banks and businesses that are "too big to fail".
Thanks for sharing.
Well that's fucking bleak, at least I got a good chuckle out of this
So that's how they keep JavaScript devs hooked!
I don't think that's a fair characterization - it sounds like they ran out of money and the company that bought all their assets didn't maintain support. (And in that company's defense, it's really hard to maintain support for something when you've bought the IP but you don't have any of the institutional knowledge.)
Maybe it’s a hot take but if you are giving life-altering treatments, and your company goes under, you should open-source everything
Would that even be legal? The company has obligations to its creditors and shareholders; simply giving away potentially valuable intellectual property right before going under seems to violate those obligations. And it's the sort of violation for which someone might be personally held liable.
I'm not claiming that a company can never open-source anything, but rather than they have to have a plausible business case for doing so. And I don't see a plausible business (as opposed to humanitarian) case here... But I'm not a corporate lawyer, just someone interested in this sort of thing.
Edit: there's also the FDA to consider. If you make medical devices and you want to release the source code, you probably need to demonstrate that it's safe for users to reprogram their devices (and it's not safe).
regardless of the the reason, people ended up with non-functional eye implants.