The article "Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices" is weak. It mixes safety and security, which are subtly different beasts. Specifically, it justifies the idea of mandatory Open Source for safety-critical software with security examples. Unfortunately, while there are independent security researchers, I have yet to meet my first independent safety researcher, who looks for flaws in life-critical equipment for fame or money or ego…
The article also completely ignores the fact that DO-178B certified code, as found embedded in civil aircrafts, has a perfect safety track record (although some incidents have, no loss of human life has yet been attributed to software malfunction in a civil aircraft).
I work on static analysis tools for critical software. In this domain, the unavailability of examples is a big pain in the neck. My colleagues and I would love to see more examples of critical embedded code available to try our tools on. But in spite of this, I have to say that I find this article highly unscientific and so tainted by politics that it becomes distasteful.
(oh, and our analysis framework is Open Source. By choice, not by constraints based on unsound reasoning)
NOTE: I merely claim that the article is unscientific, not that it makes a particular unscientific claim such "that opening up software will solve all of it problems". But since apparently I need to be more specific, here is a paragraph straight from the article:
Other public sector agencies, such as the U.S. Navy, the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office have been identified as recognizing the security benefits of publicly auditable source code.20
There is only one reference for the four sources. Let's take a look at that reference:
20 FAQs, Open Source for America, http://opensourceforamerica.org/faq (last visited July 16, 2010).
How does that page justify the above paragraph? You tell me if you find it. This is not how references are supposed to work in a scientific article. The last time I saw this kind of "he said she said" reference, it was in a text trying to justify homeopathic claims.