You're changing the topic. We're not talking about a general open source project with a potentially large userbase. So what you're essentially advocating is that we have to wait till a few hundred people serendipitously have enough time to dedicate to their hobby of writing control software for medical devices. And after that they have to validate the code, test it and ensure its correctness.
All the popular open source projects succeeded because developers got paid. This fantasy of large scale complex projects with unpaid experts writing code, developing tests, and creating documentation, etc is just that, a fantasy.
> We're not talking about a general open source project with a potentially large userbase. So what you're essentially advocating is that we have to wait till a few hundred people serendipitously have enough time to dedicate to their hobby of writing control software for medical devices. And after that they have to validate the code, test it and ensure its correctness.
Not at all. A start would be a proof of concept device with barely working software. Maybe even not that, maybe the first PoC uses an oscilloscope for visualising the data. Then someone takes e.g. a Beagleboard and dumps the data via USB into a small Python script. V2 might add a bit of a colour map with matplotlib, maybe a GUI or just live updating Jupyter notebook. That's a start.
Why does everybody assume you'd want to replace the medical devices? Did we even read the same article? The authors even say that
> "[c]reating any device for medical purposes can be incredibly expensive, but this ignores all the other uses that ultrasounds can have in education, imaging, sports training and just for fun".
Except for sports training, do we need medical certification or perfect accuracy? No. So why is it so hard to believe that one person couldn't knock something together in a weekend if the transducers were available? You know, for fun, out of curiosity?
>Not at all. A start would be a proof of concept device with barely working software.
And anyone can already do that. Creating a prototype is like 5% of the work. Nobody really cares about it unless you can ACTUALLY use it for ACTUAL stuff. I work in industrial automation and I have several hacked-together prototypes where I'm running some scripts or software on a micro-controller. And those protypes do "cool" stuff for a fraction of the cost. But there is absolutely no way my customers would ever ever consider using a prototype PLC for anything, not even testing. So I don't think you're getting it. This isn't Linux where your end users are mostly software/technical people. Normal laypeople are not interested in testing experimental stuff like this.
>Why does everybody assume you'd want to replace the medical devices? Did we even read the same article? The authors even say that
Because it would be unethical to produce medical diagnostic devices (or even call them that) without proper code review, validation, and so on.
>Except for sports training, do we need medical certification or perfect accuracy? No. So why is it so hard to believe that one person couldn't knock something together in a weekend if the transducers were available?
Okay so yeah I totally believe you can put together a janky POS that barely works and is unreliable. But without proper validation the results such systems produce are entirely useless.
> You know, for fun, out of curiosity?
Yes, I agree. You can do _ANYTHING_ for your own amusement, fun or curiosity. BUT... if you want to make something that is useful to other people you have to do a bit more work. And that work doesn't come cheap.
All the popular open source projects succeeded because developers got paid. This fantasy of large scale complex projects with unpaid experts writing code, developing tests, and creating documentation, etc is just that, a fantasy.