Open Source Automobiles?

Maybe the idea of 'open source automobiles' is a bit of a stretch, but that's what occurred to me when I read an article today from Kyodo News International, "Toyota chief voices readiness to form alliance with other carmakers.'

What struck me as particularly interesting was a quote from Toyota Motor Corp. President Katsuaki Watanabe:

"It requires conducting mammoth capital outlays for automakers to innovate their technologies in the fields of the environment, safety and the telecommunications .... There is the adequate possibility that we will form various types of alliances with others, if an automaker faces difficulties in meeting these needs single-handedly."

That quote got me thinking about recent changes in thinking around intellectual property, enabled in part by the open source movement. In an open source project, you can potentially have developers and users from multiple competing companies collaborating on developing a foundational technology that will benefit all the players. What if similar thinking were to provoke automakers to collaborate on developing basic technologies in an open fashion, then building their own proprietary technologies on those platforms, similarly to the way Red Hat packages Linux, as an example? Just a thought.

This reminds me of the step IBM took last year in opening up 500 of its patents. IBM said at the time that its intention was to:

"... form the basis of an industry-wide 'patent commons' in which patents are used to establish a platform for further innovations in areas of broad interest to information technology developers and users....

"The patents included in this pledge relate to many aspects of software innovation. Several of the patents cover dynamic linking processes for operating systems. Another patent is valuable to file-export protocols. In total, the pledged patents cover a wide breadth, including patents on important interoperability features of operating systems and databases, as well as internet, user interface, and language processing technologies."

This kind of collaborative effort doesn't necessarily preclude companies' competing with one another in a market system.

AB -- 4/18/06