Bioelectronics: New Wave of Medical Science: Would You Get a Brain Implant to Treat Disease?

1. Be my guest, if you're comfortable putting a black box in your brain capable of who knows what, and under who knows whose control.
2. This isn't true for three reasons:

First off, you're discounting first mover advantage and economies of scale, and you shouldn't. Let's take this into the realm of computer chips in general. Do you really think Intel (for example) would no longer have any incentive to develop x86 chips if their designs were open source? They still have the resources, the fabrication technology, the capital goods, etc. all up and running, when almost nobody else does at all. AMD might be better able to compete in this case, but depending on licensing, they might have to share their own innovations. (Open source is greatly beneficial for companies when their core business model is something other than software and hardware designs; for instance, selling an actual physical product.) Moreover, brand new competition would only have a real opening anyway if Intel started to develop a track record of inefficiency and milking the consumer to a breaking point (again). The same advantages would apply to the first mover in any emerging market sector.

Second, you're discounting patents (even though I'm not a fan of them).

Third, even without patents, you can still have code and hardware designs that are open and transparent (crucial for other people to be able to trust such technology) without being "open source" in the "free and open software" sense. In other words, there can be full disclosure and the possibility of independent verification without necessarily forfeiting legal proprietary copyright privileges. ARM designs work similarly, from my understanding.

"Step aside pansy." LOL...there's bravery, and there's recklessness. If you're really so cavalier about implanting technology inside yourself that could be under a total stranger's control for who knows what purpose, then that's your prerogative, but it's pretty foolhardy to be so unconditionally trusting.

First mover advantage: They'll only be acquired if they WANT to be acquired. You can argue that a large competitor might move in and crush them with resources alone, but reality has shown that this actually isn't the case for new market sectors. When it comes to completely new markets, what happens in reality is that the bigger corporations are either totally unaware of new innovations coming to market until the first mover has already gotten a foothold, or they're too sluggish and bureaucratic to branch out to a new/emerging sector based on potential alone, so they dismiss them or follow too slowly until they're already successful...at which point it is often too late. (Now, if you're trying to create a startup to compete with Intel in its own sector, that's something different entirely.)

"I don't see how that's possible."
Transparency is possible without software necessarily being free and open source (although I'd still argue in favor of the former):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

As a side note, patents do sometimes coexist with open source, or at least open standards, but I agree that it's rare (and underhanded). That's exactly the trap that Microsoft laid with the open ECMA standard for .NET.

Regarding first mover advantage...I agree that it can be iffy. Life is iffy, but first mover advantage really does tend to play a bigger role in reality than most give it credit for. (That doesn't mean everything is "A-okay" with the market today; there are a lot of other obstacles to solid competition in real life, but they mostly apply to established markets. That's no small point, considering those are the markets that most entrepreneurs enter. That's all a different discussion though.)

I agree that "shared source" is a different argument from open source. However, for the purposes of this kind of technology, I concede that shared source might be enough for me to trust it.

As for patented "open" technology, the .NET ECMA standard is the only situation where I've seen it come up. I've gotten hazy on the details over the years, so it would be easier for you to look it up than for me to look up the details and relay it to you. To summarize though, Microsoft submitted most of the .NET stack for ECMA standardization, but there are parts that are still patented. I'm not positive whether parts of the stack actually IN the ECMA standard are patented, or if it's related (but necessary) parts that were omitted from the standard. Either way, it's kind of shady. Microsoft promises easy licensing for a modest fee, which is why the Mono project created an open source implementation of most of .NET, but their terms are nonspecific, no licensing has been done yet (or at least as of the last time I looked it up), and sometimes I wonder if Microsoft is just waiting for widespread adoption and dependence on the technology in the open source world before revealing exorbitant licensing fees and slamming developers with patent violation lawsuits. Estoppel might apply here in a legal sense, but I'm no lawyer. Either way, the general point is that sometimes it's technically possible for patents and open standards to apply to the same technology, and the same could even apply for some open source code, depending on the specific license (the GPLv3 wouldn't allow this though).