prohibiting use that would result in death or personal injury

[David Johnson]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Derek J. Balling wrote:

> I'm not, as a programmer working for nobody and for free, going to 
> write code, allow it be used by some guy who's monitoring pacemakers 
> or something, and then have someone hit me with some 
> contributory-manslaughter charge because of negligent coding 
> practice, "hoping" that the court will like my disclaimer.

IANAL, however I do work for a major medical equipment manufacturer,
and can shed a few tidbits of information. In the US, the FDA regulates
medical equipment, including its research, development and engineering.
In Europe there is a similar organization overseeing all medical
devices sold in Europe.

There won't be "some guy" deciding to upload your software to a
pacemaker.  Instead, it will be a company indundated with regulatory
paperwork. The specs are chiseled in stone. And it will be tested in a
very stringent manner, by both QA personel as well as physicians and
medical technologists.

Open source software may actually be safer for its author than closed
source, since open source means full discloser. Once a medical
developer included open source code in his product, I am of the opinion
that all responsibility for its use now falls on his shoulders. Again,
IANAL.

-- 
David Johnson
_________________________
<http://www.usermode.org>