[wnkrshm]

This immediately made me think of a cyberpunk dystopia where there are shiny, pre-packaged widgets for the elite and open-source medicine for the poor masses. But then I immediately remembered that there may just be no medicine for the masses instead.

Open source tools could be a boon to civilization though, especially in developing countries - one problem is materials though. Some optics projects are really clever, like that visual microscope malaria diagnostic kit with the glass ball lens. But then again, you think: hey, are real microscopes really that unaffordable? I really have to read up on how that was financed and why that road was taken.