>> In the event of a bankruptcy proceeding, all source code for a hardware product shall be open-sourced.

I'm guessing you've never run a company into bankruptcy (which I take as a good thing.)

Bankruptcy is when liabilities exceed assets and cash doesn't exist. At that point the assets are sold to raise money to give pennies on the dollar to creditors. The assets are not "binned", they are sold. That includes intangible assets like domains, source code, hardware schematics, and so on.

What you are proposing is akin to suggesting "any buildings should become public domain" or "any cars they own should go to a local charity".

In essence you are taking one asset class and dictating how that class is disposed of. Why that class? Why not all of them?

Thirdly (I thought of another reason) it's trivial to simply store this class of asset in a separate structure, that has no liabilities and hence can't be bankrupt. It becomes simply a different asset class. (Separating assets from liabilities is a common business practice - even if a company "owns" their office, it's typically a different company.)

I don't think you're crazy, it's a good area to explore, but it's not practical to implement this in the business landscape we currently exist in.

I think what you really want is:

- create a medical product

- apply for FDA approval and put code in escrow

- get approval

In case of bankruptcy or other types of failure to maintain product, release code from escrow.

Although I wonder what would happen in this scheme if you use someone else's IP while creating a product, or parts of your stack are also obsolete.

with respect to similar sorts of things, I think the library of congress used to get copies of copyrighted works. And patents have enough drawings and descriptions to (re)create what is being patented.

Few companies write 100% of the software that runs on their hardware. If some insulin pump uses proprietary firmware licensed from Johnson & Johnson for some part of its operation, does Johnson & Johnson lose its entire firmware licensing business as soon as one customer goes bankrupt? Or are they forced to become a B2C company and manage and sell licenses to millions of people it had no relationship with before? Is it weaponizable: pick a competitor, get them to license some software to a shell company of yours that makes a token device with it, fold the shell company, and now the competitor is required to give away their firmware to the public (and you)?

What are we talking about here? The exoskeleton maker didn’t go into bankruptcy. The exoskeleton is not dependent on cloud services (or at least it is not reported that they would have gone away) and no company acquired anyone.

You are proposing extensive changes, with undeniably serious chance of side effects and your proposal doesn’t even address the issue from the article.

Case 2 probably ends up being hacked to mine cryptocurrency. If it's a prosthesis, I guess it secretly does delivery runs when you're sleeping. If you (a normal consumer) don't burn out the motor/blow up the battery while messing with it.

There are tradeoffs from supporting-but-not-really-supporting unmaintained products. Also, in this case, it sounds like they were missing hardware that wouldn't have been fixed by publishing the software.

Maybe it could be done by considering the technical dependencies as a debt toward customers that should be higher in the debt hierarchy. So if any debtor want the assets of a company, he will have to find a way to manage this sort of "technical/services" debt first.

I don’t fully understand how bankruptcy works but isn’t it just gives whatever you have to creditors? Source code and hardware designs fits into assets. No?

Not crazy, but the actual issue was due to the FDA.

Please don’t let the following stop your thinking. We need many solutions.

FTA: He said that the company is no longer repairing exoskeletons older than five years because the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the devices, has approved their usage for that timespan.

Reminds me of oil well remediation

Why do we need bankruptcy? That's way too late.

All owners of hardware should have a licence to inspect and modify the code it runs. Not necessarily open source, just something tied to the hardware itself at a bare minimum.

Nobody would extend credit to software companies if that were the law