Am I correctly reading your implication that, although this is a strong point in favor of the right-to-repair movement, you remain personally unconvinced in it as a whole? If so, what's holding you back from being fully convinced?
If a person who decides to make pop music can DRM their work, why shouldn't a person who goes into life saving tech DRM theirs? "think of the children!" Hey, if you care so much about the children, pay your bills. Covid caused unforseen problems? you know what? they were unforeseen.
The person who created the life saving tech already saved a bunch of lives, those lives are still saved, and it seems a little ungrateful to claim they haven't done enough for you.
and btw, what you said is completely obvious to the point of dreary cliche, "things more important than the bottom line", like Phoebe's realization on Friends that she and her mother had a lot in common because turns out they both love pizza and puppies.
What I said was food for thought and unexpectedly (in an inside out sort of way) explanatory toward the question asked by the comment I was replying to.
maybe you could stop stopping and smelling the flowers on the road less taken for a minute and consider ideas with depth, it might make all the difference.
I think you point to a real conflict of interests though where some may feel less motivated to work on life-saving tech if they aren't compensated for it. Here in the UK, the government launched a scheme called "Eat Out to Help Out" to help support businesses like takeaways which had understandably had low revenue during COVID. I would have been happy to see a subsidy (and pay a tax towards it) for companies manufacturing life-saving tech if it was the only sustainable solution.
We live forward in time, not backward.
Also, people know about IP rights. Either it's the law of the land or a treaty obligation. Clearly documented, as are the available remedies in case of dispute. Available to everybody, in theory.
This "DRM" was unilateral. Surreptitious. Why do this if not to remove agency from the client at some later date? Why bypass the legal system? Silently?
Altruism? Maybe, but that's just as bad, idealists and coercion go hand in hand throughout human history.
Pragmatism? Seems more likely. The trains can be fixed, except they get turned off from the mothership whenever they seem to be in the shop. They don't fix them for free, presumably.
Either way, that is some snake ass shit, since it's undocumented. Poor.