from Hacker News

I'm calling Bullshit on Medtronic's Open Sourcing of a ventilator design

by bhc on 3/31/20, 3:52 AM with 27 comments

• by karthikb on 3/31/20, 5:22 AM

  Not only are the files incomplete to actually go into production, they’ve picked a model where the components are not readily available on the open market in quantities large enough to have an impact corresponding to effort. IC4 is some variant of the ST10F27 (can’t make out the last digit from the low res pdf they’ve provided), and there are only a few thousand of all variants of that chip available online with quotes lead times of up to 30 weeks.

  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...

• by devy on 3/31/20, 6:00 AM

  More dirt of Medtronic:

  - 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...

• by jdkee on 3/31/20, 4:16 AM

  Nationalize this IP and require the IP to be open source. Figure out the payments afterwards.

• by jacquesm on 3/31/20, 6:10 AM

  Medtronic's slogan ought to be 'yesterday's tech for tomorrows prices'.

• by ryanobjc on 3/31/20, 6:16 AM

  This looks like the kind of documentation that all end users would get. Enough to do PM maybe, enough to operate it, enough to satisfy regulatory requirements (eg: prove how the tech was tested, what those procedures were, controls on the docs, etc).

  There is no way to manufacture one from this set of docs.

• by newyankee on 3/31/20, 4:20 AM

  I wonder if there is a project where a cheaper hospital for a third world country can be created by using tech which is old but not covered under current IP (expired patents).

  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.