this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
119 points (99.2% liked)
Privacy
31266 readers
425 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
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. 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).