Ok, I found this on endgadget and…it’s weird lol!
At the AutoRAI car show in Amsterdam, a group of Dutch researchers presented what they called “the world’s first open source car”, calling it “c,mm,n” (pronounced “common”); what makes it open source? You have access to blueprints and tech drawings and can modify it any which way you want and share your changes.
Now…somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but…hasn’t people been doing this almost from the day of the first automobile? Or have I been hallucinating the existence of all those modified cars out there?
Anyway, there’s a website for the c,mm,n tho, unfortunately, it’s in dutch or similar language which I can’t read
The endgadget article says they don’t know if it’ll be running linux (why does stuff have to run linux to be called open source?), but they do know it’ll be running a hydrogen engine and you *may* be able to share traffic information with other c,mm,n drivers.
Why did I call it weird? Well…I’m not sure that you can call a car Open Source, because of the definition of what Open Source means. Maybe the blueprints and tech drawings are OSI compliant, but not the cars themselfs…why? Because they don’t mention the formulas for all the material also being distributed with the car (or available to buyers).
On the other hand…since I can’t read the website, I’m not sure that such formulas are *not* available, so…who knows?
Anyway, the story is interesting mostly because the term Open Source has become powerful enough to go beyond the boundaries of software and has become a part of the physical world…even if it’s only on the marketing side, but that’s a start :)
So…welcome to the future? :)
Technorati Tags: open source car, cars, automobiles, autorai car show
Tags: Geekness, Tech
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!!
Comments
This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Geekness, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I have a PDF around here for open source cola that was made by a Canadian firm. The cola itself was entirely a marketing device meant to teach the non computer savoy part of the public what open source was and what their company is doing. But now the company has gone under, and the cola continues to have a growing following :)
Until I read that PDF, I never knew how many toxic things were in cola.
OSS Manufacturing…
I’m headed back to my old habit of trolling the bottom of the TTLB ecosystem and I found this gem talking about an open source car. I found the car conceptually interesting but impractical but the one comment to the……