What is the point of all these? Large scale manufacturers have already been sent blueprints of ventilators and have the engineering ability and production lines to make them. Then you need trained nurses and staff to operate them.
Open source designs could help scale up production in times of need by allowing manufacturers to self-assess whether they're capable of providing additional capacity.
Yes, we assume blueprints have now been shared and that production is scaling up - but it has required a lot of time, effort, communication and bargaining.
That said, open source alone is not a panacea. Questions should be asked of open source designs:
- Do the designs meet regulatory standards for the market(s) they are intended for?
- Is the quality assurance process equally open, so that manufacturers & recipients can verify whether products are authentic and fit-for-purpose?
It looks like the OSV project are aware of these questions and provide their working assumptions and information about work-in-progress on their homepage.
