alt Hacker NewsWhy do people think constantly something made by some random company is automatically better than something made "DIY".
I totally understand, that because of liability and some more availability of resources, you would expect a company product to be "safe". BUT: if it is your butt that is going to be in the line, then I bet you: you will be much more careful that a random engineer in some random company. About the resources available in a big company, they are usually more directed to marketing, legal (including lobbing to avoid right to repair) and oder areas to maximize revenue, and not exactly in quality.
I worked in 2 different big companies which worked in "mission critical systems" and boy! I can tell you some stories about how unsafe is what they do, and how much money is invested in "cover your ass" instead of making products better/safer.
I thought I explained it, but I'll break it down into smaller words. Medical software doesn't just have to solve one particular users's problems. It has to be generalized to the majority of folk seeking treatment for a particular problem. If one particular CPAP user is able to tweak their settings to work better for their particular lifestyle, it is not generalizeable to every CPAP user. A corporation offering a general solution is put under *far* more scrutiny than a random github repo is. A corporation can be sued for releasing a product that kills people, but good luck convincing a court that your family deserves restitution for you installing a random script you found on the internet into your insulin pump.
This has fuck all to do with how much corporations care about people. It has everything to do with liability laws and how victims can get restitution. It has everything to do with the actual risks of installing random internet scripts versus the corporations who have to jump through regulatory hoops. And it's not to say corporations get everything right. They fuck things up constantly. But they fuck things up constantly with oversight and regulation and you want me to believe random internet users will make a better product without it. It's nonsense.