I attended a chat last night with someone who works for a very large medical device company. They talked about how important intellectual property was to them and that it is their life blood. So they patent as much as possible and lock up everything as tight they can to get a competetive advantage on the competition.
However, he also stressed "living the mission" where there mission is to essentially alievate pain, help people live longer better lives." And in his next breath he said that his company would sue anyone who copies their ideas to do remote patient check ups on pacemakers etc.
So I asked, doesn't this contradict the mission, how can you on one hand be for helping people but writing proprietary software that maximizes your revenue? Why don't you open source it all, wouldn't that be a better fulfillment of the mission? He responded by saying that it is essential that the company do this to ensure that it can be financially healthy to continue to provide these services and develop new ones.
It seemed pretty logical to me, but I want to hear what the/. crowd and the fsf folks have to say as this is a lot of what I hear coming out of this company and even other tech companies. So its a huge obsticle to overcome for the open source/fs movement.
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I attended a chat last night with someone who works for a very large medical device company. They talked about how important intellectual property was to them and that it is their life blood. So they patent as much as possible and lock up everything as tight they can to get a competetive advantage on the competition.
/. crowd and the fsf folks have to say as this is a lot of what I hear coming out of this company and even other tech companies. So its a huge obsticle to overcome for the open source/fs movement.
However, he also stressed "living the mission" where there mission is to essentially alievate pain, help people live longer better lives." And in his next breath he said that his company would sue anyone who copies their ideas to do remote patient check ups on pacemakers etc.
So I asked, doesn't this contradict the mission, how can you on one hand be for helping people but writing proprietary software that maximizes your revenue? Why don't you open source it all, wouldn't that be a better fulfillment of the mission? He responded by saying that it is essential that the company do this to ensure that it can be financially healthy to continue to provide these services and develop new ones.
It seemed pretty logical to me, but I want to hear what the