Re: Micro Manager
>>> 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.
>
--
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Johan Henriksson
MSc Engineering
PhD student, Karolinska Institutet
http://mahogny.areta.org http://www.endrov.net
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