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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

I’m not putting anything in my body unless its entire codebase and hardware design are public and extensively formally verified. Current medical device standards are clearly insufficient and off-base as they allow for garbage like pacemakers with vulnerable Bluetooth stacks.

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Fair enough.

The VAST majority of users do not care, and many programmers (myself included) do not believe that formal verification is likely for many larger or more complex systems if they have a tech stack element somewhere in mix (probably not on the device itself but perhaps interfacing / programming it).

We will see who wins in the market, the open source player with a public and extensive FORMAL verification (NOT EASY!) or the closed source player, first to market, sales reps going to Drs offices etc

Almost certainly the latter will "win" in the sense of getting widespread adoption. If current technologies are any indication, this will lead to people, like the poster you're responding to and myself as well, who view proprietary control of such a device an unacceptable risk not adopting the technology until a FOSS alternative is made. If the device sees widespread adoption, this will probably happen several years later, and be mature enough to use about a decade later.

The latter will probably win due to high time preference and soft money. My standard is basically an admission that I'm not going to be able to use any of this hardware, unless there's a separate market for power users.

Augustus Cole from that X-Files episode would like to disagree.

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