Steven Kovar - Interactive Designer

Hydrogen Car Design to be Released “Open Source”

June 16, 2009

Riversimple unveiled their hydrogen car today in London. The designs for the car will be released online, and open source.

It’s interesting to consider the how much faster green technologies, and technology in general, would evolve if more durable goods companies followed the open source model. The proposed system in this case releases the plans and design of the hydrogen car, and in turn requires agreement from external companies that are making it to share any design improvements with the original designers, Riversimple, who in turn then republish these improvements online and open source. This obviously reduces the overhead and need for Riversimple to create a large manufacturing facility and distribution network and allows Riversimple to focus on engineering. The open source movement in software has certainly improved the quality and availability of software for PC users, for example; Mozilla, Webkit, Linux, etc. The open source movement succeeds by engaging a community, driven by a common goal, rather than by following the old model of creating products purely for profit. Can this business model revolutionize industry? Can a failing GM be broken into a thousand localized workshops spread throughout the world?

Visit the BBC news article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8103106.stm
Visit the Riversimple site: http://www.riversimple.com/

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