Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk recently hinted that the company would possibly do something important relating to their Tesla patents last week, and now Elon Musk has kept his promise.
Elon Musk has announced on the Tesla Blog that the company will now make their patents open source, and they will be available for any vehicle manufacturer to use in ‘good faith’.
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.
Musk says that they did not make Tesla Patents available at first as they were worried about the big car companies copying their technology, but this hasn’t happened.
Now that Tesla is an established brand, and car manufacturer, their CEO is obviously less worried about competition from the big manufacturers on electric vehicles.
Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.
This is great news for electric vehicles, as Tesla’s technology for EV’s is impressive, and their Tesla Model S comes with one of the longest ranges available on an EV.
It certainly makes a change from the big companies that guard their technology in the fear that someone might steal or copy it, and end up suing each other, like Apple and Samsung, who have spent the last few years in court fighting over patents.
Source Tesla