I was initially pleasantly surprised with this release but tweeted my disappointment pretty quickly. Even with a schematic it can take months to get the layout right and validated on a line, build and setup the test apparatus...
If you know there is never a chance someone could mass produce your machine to threat your revenue, it's disingenuous at best to claim open sourcing your 15 year old modal could help for other to mass produce ventilators in the next few days or weeks (NOT YEARS!!!).
It just doesn't help in short time and in long term it doesn't matter because we need the ventilators NOW!
- In May 2018, Medtronic was ranked as the largest corporate tax inversion in history. [1]
- Medtronic weaseled their way out of creating affordable ventilators for the US government.[2]
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-id...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
Even when you bring tech into your personal life, remember that it's one more thing you need to patch, backup, replace, etc.
There is no way to manufacture one from this set of docs.
I mean i believe stuff like MRI cannot be manufactured by non large manufacturers but what about all other machines.
My guess is the bottleneck would be no one except current manufacturers make it at scale to do it cheap enough. It would be a great project to have though.
When i look at the prices of certain devices it just boggles my mind. It is crazier when one realizes that some of these are not even patent protected.
