How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

by Matt Ridley

Most do so during their free time and share them freely with others. He gives the example of Nightscout, a technology for monitoring the sugar levels in diabetics via the internet. Nightscout is the brainchild of several parents of diabetic children. A company called Dexcom developed the sensors that record blood sugar levels from skin patches and display them on a pager. In 2013 a supermarket software engineer in Livonia, New York, John Costik, worried about knowing his young son’s glucose level while he was at school, hacked the device so he could see his son’s data on the web, then shared his source code with others via social media. One of these was an engineer in northern California, Lane Desborough, who also had a son with diabetes and designed a home-display system, coining the name Nightscout. That in turn was seen by a molecular biologist in southern California named Jason Adams, also with a diabetic son, who developed and set up a Facebook group for parents using the Nightscout system. Only concern about regulations and intellectual property held them back from publishing open-source code earlier than they did. Nobody here was after a profit. The latest incarnation of this trend is an artificial pancreas for diabetics with open-source software, designed and evolved by patients themselves.