My last encounter with the FDA was in the context of blood bank software and
it is considered a "medical device". It would be useful to this discussion
and the future to know what types of software actually need FDA approval.
This would help define where it would be "safer" to develop OSS.....
unneccessary fear uncertainty and doubt is a waste of time, even if the guy
at Motorola, or is it Intel, thinks that only the parnaoid survive. Besides
it is more likely that OSS healthware will take off outside the US anyways
so it may be a bit of a red herring anyway.
Joseph
Joseph Dal Molin
Office: 1.416.232.1206
Cell Phone: 1.416.818.9156
----- Original Message -----
From: Gunther Schadow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 1999 12:14 PM
Subject: life will find a way (was: liability for open source medical
software)
> Just a quick follow-up on the notion of "life will find a way". Yes it
> will, but life is often cruel, unjust, and life favors the strongest
> and most powerful and lucy one to survive--not necessarily the
> best. Thus life on its way to the better can take substantial
> deviations for years, decades, centuries, ...
>
> OSS projects can be significantly harmed by even the slightest
> discreditation through court proceedings or "won't work" beliefs
> heralded in magazines. The FreeBSD project is an example. Back in
> 1992 when the BSD UNIX operating system was first deployed as an
> open-source project for the PC platform, everything was looking very
> promising. Linux was still quite unstable and a hacker's project while
> BSD could build on a code base that was proofed and debugged for more
> than a decade already. BSD was known to be stable and good, all that
> was left was to fix the interface to the PC hardware. It should have
> been a home run.
>
> But, there was this nasty lawsuit against UCB for releasing 4.3 BSD
> Net/2 and 4.4 BSD with some minor parts of propriertary AT&T code in
> it. As everyone knows, the problem was resolved in the following
> years, leading to BSD 4.4 lite (without having any noticable impact on
> the functioning and quality of the code.) But these months of court
> proceedings were really hurting the *BSD projects, Linux was selected
> by by the magazine editors to be the hype of the next years, and so
> the industry went with Linux and, by and large, ignored the free BSDs.
>
> The market is very sensitive, like a grizzly bear it smells open
> wounds over many miles distance. Unlike a grizzly bear the market will
> not attack the wounded individual, but it will avoid it (which is just
> as bad.) If there is any principle in the market, then it is "to
> avoid possible loosers." Even if the loosers aren't really loosing,
> they can be vitally hurt due to being avoided.
>
> Now that's for big multi-purpose OSS projects, and one could argue
> that it's enough that one OSS OS (Linux) had still become very popular
> in the market. But, the question is (1) has life gone straight or did
> it take a diversion? And (2) would a smaller and more specialized
> open-source project have survived the court proceedings and period of
> avoidance?
>
> If I were to invest a real living on an healthcare OSS project I would
> be very, very cautious (if not downright pessimistic.) Because if I
> invest in this, I must win the game and I can not settle with being
> happy about another OSS project to succeed during the period that I am
> bogged down by lawsuits. So, who wants to be the first?
>
> regards
> -Gunther
>
> Gunther Schadow -----------------------------------
http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu
> Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
> 1001 W 10th Street RG5, Indianapolis IN 46202, Phone: (317) 630 7960
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------- #include
<usual/disclaimer>
>
