Elon Musk Takes His Electric Vehicle Company To The Open Source Market b4in.org/s4gP When founding a company intent on becoming a brand leader in electronic automobile production, it was no mistake that Elon Musk, the visionary behind the now-ubiquitous online payment clearinghouse PayPal and private space consortium SpaceX, named his company after Nikola Tesla, a man whom many regard as the father of electricity. In fact, presenting Tesla with an award, the Vice President of the Institute of Electrical Engineers stated, “Were we to seize and eliminate from our industrial world the result of Mr. Tesla’s work, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be dark and our mills would be idle and dead. His name marks an epoch in the advance of electrical science.” On Thursday, Elon Musk announced a change in the way Tesla will conduct business that mirrors another trait of the namesake for his company. In an open letter on the company’s blog, Musk renounced every patent the company now holds stating, “Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.” If you have been paying attention to the world of technology, specifically as it pertains to software and hardware development, you are most probably aware of the open source movement. The idea is that a community of organizations and individuals work together to make a potentially good product or platform a great one. The technology is then open and available to anyone who wants to use it or build upon it at no cost. It should come as no surprise that Musk, who cut his teeth in the tech world, wants to take that model and apply it to a new industry in a novel way. The concept of patenting belongs to a bygone era, according to Musk. Where once they were a useful protection, he now sees them only as an inhibitor to innovation and progress. A patent, he contends, serves to entrench a large corporation to a staked out position around their intellectual property and ultimately only enriches members of the legal profession and not the inventors themselves. “I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit,” Musk explained. More b4in.org/s4gP
Posted on: Sun, 15 Jun 2014 10:26:24 +0000
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