>>> 2. Anybody willing to ask upstream to clean up their licenses? >> you can't imagine how much pressure we are putting on the responsible >> companies. unfortunately their IP lawyers haven't given up yet. they >> want to make sure the control codes are not given out. some of the >> hardware has to be reverse engineered (I have only signed one NDA to >> keep my hands clean for other vendors). still, they have softened up >> plenty over the years. if new buyers require open source drivers, we'll >> win. money talks. > > Perhaps somebody from the Debian Med project might be able to > increase the preasure from "an additional side". If we might be > able to establish Debian Med as some "instance for software in > medical care" we might gain some more weight - at least this is > the plan ... the big problem is that they have realized that the after market is worth plenty. if users can't upgrade the software and it becomes the limiting factor, they buy new hardware. if people like software X they might have to buy the hardware for X. if they want an additional feature then there is only one place where they can go. unfortunately biologists in general want a commercial package (if you have a company you can always complain, even if it's useless) and they expect things to work out of the box, something research open source unfortunately isn't very good at. you take what sort of works. but that's changing and the pressure to do more niche research will probably tear down this monopoly, it's just a matter of time.
mentioning medical applications will probably scare the companies even more. that's were the money is. chance is reverse engineering will be the only way forward in this field. /Johan > > Kind regards > > Andreas. > -- -- ------------------------------------------------ Johan Henriksson MSc Engineering PhD student, Karolinska Institutet http://mahogny.areta.org http://www.endrov.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-med-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org