I read the article. The company I previously worked for designed and manufactured monitors that are used for scopic surgeries - laporascopy, endoscopy, etc. Most of these scopes are sold by the manufacturer alongside a monitor, and they use special signal formats to prevent other manufacturers from selling monitors to hospitals for their equipment. This ensures that every sale of a scope also becomes a sale for a monitor.
My old company spent a lot of time figuring out how to make our monitors work with all these crazy signals, and I was involved in many meetings with engineers who were designing workarounds to make a particular scope work with our monitors.
One of the huge advantages of buying a monitor like ours that could work with every scope and device in an OR over purchasing the specialized monitors was not only the cost savings of buying one monitor to work with many machines but also the way we could wire up the ORs to have a lot less equipment cluttering up the space around the patient where the surgeons and nurses needed to be.
Having worked in both software development and engineering, I tend to have a bit more of a software developer’s perspective that open source is better for the world, and I like the engineers that have sought out those kind of solutions, but it is easier to engineer physical devices that lock customers into buying more of your products and also keep everything working smoothly together, which is a huge competitive advantage. But I think in the end it is a great advantage to be the company that can “break the locks” and offer solutions that work for every device, because I think these are so much more appealing and useful.
