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The Riversimple Open Source Car Design
Are Our Designs Free?
Patrick's blog
40 Fires Foundation June 19, 2009
How does open source car design work?
The honest answer is that we won't know until we have done
it. But we have plenty of ideas, which will develop over the coming months
as we share the designs for the Riversimple technology demonstrator and
start to produce collaboratively a production prototype.
There are lots of inspiring examples from open source
software, and we are being advised by people with experience in this area.
But there are many differences between open source hardware and software
design.
Differences between open source hardware and software
There are some major differences between open source software
and hardware design:
- There is a "gap" between the on-line design work and the finished
product delivered to the consumer. Not only is there substantial physical
testing to be done, but also there is significant work to be done to turn
the designs into an actual functioning product (we like the analogy of a
food recipe – a recipe is not a meal, you need a chef to turn it into a
meal). The answer we believe lies in establishing the right relationship
between 40 Fires and the manufacturers (the first of which is Riversimple),
where each party has its needs met.
- There’s a technical challenge to share ideas on-line, where there is
no satisfactory open source CAD (Computer-Aided Design) application. Our
solution is to use a low tech approach at first, using a wiki-based
website and freely available 3-D viewers to show the 3-D drawings. In time
we may get involved in developing a OS CAD program.
- Licensing. We cannot simply take the standard OS software license
(the GPL is the most common), since we are dealing with hardware, which is
not so well protected by copyright. See further down for some thoughts on
the licensing issues.
We'd like to hear from you!
As in Open Source software projects, we are not attempting to
do everything at once and we don’t have to. The designs that Riversimple
is licensing to 40 Fires resemble in many ways the code base which a
complex software project starts with.
However, because a car is different to software and requires
different development stages and processes, we will be asking for input
into specific areas, as well as procedural matters.
That's why we would like to hear from you, not only from
engineers or designers, but also if you have contributed to large scale
open source software projects and can help set up our project management
structure. Lawyers with an understanding of copyright and patents would
also be useful as we review the most appropriate license to use and if and
how we should be using patents for some new inventions which emerge.
To get involved, send an e-mail to
participate@40fires.org explaining your interest and skills.
The stages
We envisage different stages:
Stage 1 Over the coming months, starting this month (July
2009), we will make available design schematics from the Riversimple
technology demonstrator vehicle, together with a description of each
component's function in the whole system, and a vehicle design brief for
the production prototype. We will provide a mailing list or discussion
forum to enable comments and discussions. At this stage we expect
Riversimple, as the creator of the original designs, to be leading the
discussions.
Stage 2 As the detailed discussions develop, we expect a
broad consensus to emerge amongst the participants as to which is the best
solution to pursue for each design . By this stage, we expect the
conversations to be more democratic, with a broad cross-section of
collaborators participate, sharing their knowledge and insights.
Stage 3 We start creating detailed designs collaboratively
and publishing them on-line. Eventually an entire vehicle will be created,
and tested, on-line. We are aiming to complete the design of the
production prototype by the summer of 2010.
Stage 4 Riversimple and other entrepreneurs, under license
from 40 Fires, can start downloading the schematics and building and
testing the vehicles. With the lessons from this, work can start on an
improved production prototype.
Are our designs free (as in beer)?
Richard Stallman famously said that free software is "free as
in speech not free as in beer."
Are our designs free?
We consider that the designs themselves will be free in the
sense of free speech, with one exception. Currently we have chosen a
Creative Commons, non-commercial license. So the designs can be used,
modified, distributed under the same license terms but not for commercial
purposes.
We have chosen to be conservative at this stage and not
allowed commercial use. This may change - we intend to set up a discussion
group to debate this. The issue is that we don't want a large,
profit-focused organisation taking the designs and starting manufacturing
with them yet. We intend that when we grant a manufacturing license, this
will be for a small fee (say $10 per car) to cover 40 Fires running costs.
We are also keen on collaborating so if a commercial
organisation wants to use the designs, we'd like to chat with them first
before allowing them to use the designs for commercial purposes.
The licensing issues are very complex (patent law is not
copyright law; cars are not software) and we don't pretend to have all the
answers. It is quite possible that our license may in the end not meet the
strict requirements of the Free Software Foundation. But all we really
care about is that the license works to ensure that the cars can be built
in hundreds of different variations around the world, by local companies
and entrepreneurs as well as big multinationals if they like, and that no
one company (whether Ford or Riversimple) can dominate the market and keep
the ideas to itself. |
