According to the article, the eyes are still working for now, but if something goes wrong they’re screwed.
Very tricky situation. Having the government do things like this is one option (although the government isn’t doing it), but having laws forcing these corporations to be open source is another tentative solution.
Audited open-source (software and hardware) + no auto-updates would be the only way I could trust-ish a private company (or a bourgeois government) with this. Unfortunately, the people who need this probably can’t afford to be cautious, but imagine what would happen if the eyes stopped working while the user was driving
I argue it needs to be free/libre software not just open source. Yes there is a difference; “Open Source” is usually used as a marketing term by companies and refers to software that is under a permissive license, which doesn’t necessarily grant the users any freedoms; It can still contain proprietary binaries or have strings attached in some other way. In other words it can still serve the interests of private person(s) by only releasing parts (usually non-crucial) of the source code.
I’m aware of the difference, but even with a copyleft license, there may still be proprietary blobs (e.g. Linux). That’s why auditing and general transparency are important.
I’d like a pair of bionic eyes without a Wi-Fi card, please
According to the article, the eyes are still working for now, but if something goes wrong they’re screwed.
Very tricky situation. Having the government do things like this is one option (although the government isn’t doing it), but having laws forcing these corporations to be open source is another tentative solution.
Audited open-source (software and hardware) + no auto-updates would be the only way I could trust-ish a private company (or a bourgeois government) with this. Unfortunately, the people who need this probably can’t afford to be cautious, but imagine what would happen if the eyes stopped working while the user was driving
I argue it needs to be free/libre software not just open source. Yes there is a difference; “Open Source” is usually used as a marketing term by companies and refers to software that is under a permissive license, which doesn’t necessarily grant the users any freedoms; It can still contain proprietary binaries or have strings attached in some other way. In other words it can still serve the interests of private person(s) by only releasing parts (usually non-crucial) of the source code.
Copyleft licenses are the only way to go here if you want software where the user has 100% control.
I’m aware of the difference, but even with a copyleft license, there may still be proprietary blobs (e.g. Linux). That’s why auditing and general transparency are important.