Tesla Motors’ Opting for Open Standards Is a Good Idea

A young reader of 2GreenEnergy asks for my reaction to Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk’ s decision to open up many of his company’s patents into the public domain:

Are you watching Chris Hayes on MSNBC? He just ran an interview with Elon Musk where Elon said he was opening up his patents to the public and would not pursue intellectual property charges against anyone that used his technology.

I respond:

No, I haven’t been watching that, but I am aware generally of what he’s doing with his patents.  I don’t claim to understand his motives fully, but I’m glad about what he’s doing, whatever his reasoning may be.  The world doesn’t need another land-grab for proprietary protocols that it experienced in spades in the late 20th Century in IT.

You’re too young to remember the history of Microsoft.  I’ll omit the details in which they were indicted for illegal business practices and jump forward to the introduction of Windows 8, arguably the single most stupid, bug-ridden piece of crap offered since the company’s inception, even worse than Vista by most accounts.  Hundreds of millions of people all over the world are dumbstruck with anger, but it’s just another turn of the page for Microsoft.  To be clear, there is no criminality here, but merely wanton disregard for their customers, locked, as they are, into this proprietary (and frustrating) computing architecture.

Be this as it may.  My point is that open standards—not only for computing, but, even more importantly, for the next paradigm in transportation—are very, very cool.