In a move that many people will no doubt consider very bold and even more people will label as downright crazy, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said the company has opened its patents, in the spirit of the open source movement, “for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.”

Musk said Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use its technology . The executive said Tesla initially felt compelled to create patents “out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla.”

However, Musk added that never happened, on the contrary, electric car programs at the major manufacturers are “small to non-existent”, making up an average of far less than 1 percent of their total vehicle sales.

“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,” Musk said in a statement.

Following his logic, the market for electric cars is enormous, with Tesla’s true competition being the huge number of gasoline cars and not the small trickle of rival electric cars. This is why Musk thinks the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.

“We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position,” Musk said.

We’ll see what the implications of Tesla’s will be, but it’s worth mentioning reports of meetings between BMW and Tesla executives.

By Dan Mihalascu

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