Your long read for the day, an interview at Logic magazine with Tarek Loubani who founded the Glia Project, an organization producing high-quality low-cost open source medical hardware. You probably heard of some of their projects in the past, this is a great, super opinionated discussion and a fantastic project. Loubani could be a character straight out of a Cory Doctorow novel, from project to opinions.
[I]n the same way that drug manufacturers copy brand-name drugs and sell them for less as generics, the Glia Project makes generics of medical hardware. Loubani is also distributing the means of producing that hardware — 3D printers — and training Canadian medical students and regular Gazans to print medical equipment themselves. […]
But what if we had the ability to create the alternative before the bad guys show up? The guys who love patents, the guys who love copyright, the guys who love all that shit. What if we could create a culture that was resilient enough that it could resist the coming influx of capitalism? […]
What we are doing is exactly the inverse. We’re doing all of our development in the First World, and then deploying it in the Third World — the idea being that mistakes are very expensive in the Third World and very cheap in Canada. […]
What is a patent? A patent is the government incentivizing innovation by encouraging inventors. It does this by spending people’s freedom — it gives the inventor the right to prevent other people from making or using that invention for a period of time.