Open Source

One of the ideas I've been pondering is: Open Green .. It would be a place to facilitate open source green vehicle related projects. I've been scribbling ideas in a notebook for a couple months and while I'm not convinced about this it seems to be a good idea with some merit.

Goal: increase the availability of 'green' technology .. engage the people themselves in solving the issues of sustainable technology, because it seems if we leave it to the big companies they'll twist it to not be green nor sustainable ..

The Instructibles site is pretty close to what I'm thinking of. BUT their focus is on HOWTO and not DESIGN TEAM ... that is, someone who's already figgered out how to do something, they can show off what they've designed. But if a group wants to work together on a project, Instructibles is not the place to do it.

One requirement is some writings giving guidance on the open source model, the kinds of licenses which are known, governance, etc. I've looked at several projects which profess to be open source vehicle projects, and often the license has conditions which don't meet the norms of open source, or the project development isn't done in the open, etc. On the other hand as we discussed in Open Source Ponderings an open source license on a physical widget can make for business difficulties.

It seems such a site needs to be organized as 'projects' each of which has a cluster of pages for documentation, some kind of forum for project discussion, an issue tracker for reporting and tracking "bugs", and a source code management system for storing and versioning the assets of the project. Most of that can be built using Drupal and can even reside within the VisForVoltage site (if we wanted). The issue tracker is difficult in Drupal but either it's not as necessary as I'm thinking, or else a bugzilla instance could be installed and used instead.

What prompted me to write is an exchange on the ThunderSky group .. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ThunderSky/message/1741 ...

And, I've been collecting a number of links on open source hardware licensing and projects ..

My day job is involved with open source software advocacy. While many think the company I work for (Sun Microsystems) doesn't "get" open source software there are many of us working here who do, and many of us work on open source software full time (as I do). Sooo....

This morning I had this inspired thought of a gizmo for an EV .. it looks like a really cool idea and I want to do a bit more thinking about this before I reveal anything. Anyway my first thinking was "hmm... what kind of patent or intellectual property protections do I need ..etc" to make a company to sell this gizmo. And then I remembered "oh, wait, open source" ...

So here's a conundrum of a couple ways to develop this idea.

The traditional method is what we call "closed source". You get all secretive, don't tell anybody, have a secret hideout where you develop the product, you post tantalizing snippets on youtube that don't reveal anything important but builds buzz, etc.. that kinda thing. You file for patents, trademarks, etc. You make suppliers sign NDA agreements, etc. Maybe in the end someone will reverse engineer your gizmo and undercut you (because they didn't have to pay out all the R&D cost because you did it for them).

Whatever it's flaws the traditional closed source method is a tried and true way of running a business. In business school they tell the MBA's to look for proprietary advantages etc that lock in customers etc.

In the open source way the design is revealed and published and everybody is free to duplicate the design. Not only that, they're free to modify the design and redistribute modified versions. It's kind of a puzzle how to make money when your customers can build their very own instance of the gizmo.

However one result in open source software is the nature of it leads to a community project. In my case I could publish the outline of the gizmo I have in mind and then work with some of y'all to improve and refine this gizmo. We would together develop it.

At the end there is a question of who gets to build a business selling the gizmo once we get it designed.

An advantage of open source for electric vehicles is that the customer base becomes more empowered to maintain their machines. Why, look at Mik's saga of his Vectrix that he now is calling Vectux. If the Vectrix corporation were more open about their implementation then perhaps Mik would not have had so much trouble. On the other hand the Vectrix corporation clearly wants their customers to see the price as payment for a high level of service. And not everybody who wants to buy an EV is willing or able to do the mechanical or electrical work to do their own maintenance.

Finally, I've been thinking for awhile that open source development of electric vehicle gizmos might speed up development and adoption of electric vehicles.

(BTW, there are some Drupal features which could be installed on VisForVoltage which could enable open source projects to be hosted on this site)