Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology. 
 
 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. 
 
 When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. 
 
 At Tesla, however, we 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. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. 
 
 At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all. 
 
 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. 
 
 We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. 
 
 Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard. 

 The automaker is named for Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. In 1907, Tesla's alternating current technology was being licensed by Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. Tesla sold Westinghouse his patents for a $216,000 lump sum — less than 2% of what they were said to be worth — to help the company defend Tesla's technology from Thomas Edison and his direct current technology.
– Electric car maker Tesla Motors is handing over the keys to its technology in an unusual effort to encourage other automakers to expand beyond gasoline-burning vehicles. Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised today to give away the company's entire patent portfolio to all comers, as long as they promised not to engage courtroom battles over intellectual property. "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," Musk wrote in a blog post on the company's Web site. Other automakers using Tesla's technology could potentially share the cost of Tesla's charging stations, for example. And more charging stations could entice skeptical buyers to try electric cars. Tesla currently makes one vehicle—the $70,000 Model S sedan—and is developing two others. But Musk said Tesla can't make a dent in the market by itself, and thinks the patents could be a "modest" help to other companies developing electric cars. “Even if other competitors copy Tesla’s design, Tesla still gets to sell them batteries, and that’s pretty awesome," a Stanford patent law expert tells the LA Times. "Tesla's decision isn't entirely altruistic." The shift to open source is intriguing, but "there are many unanswered questions" about how it will fly in reality, writes Brian Solomon at Forbes.