zlacker

>>gkober+(OP)
There is no legal covenant here. I imagine Tesla’s definition of “good faith” is “we evaluate on a case by case basis”.

Which amounts to “if we like you” and “we reserve the right”. If they wanted these patents to be open source, they would license them explicitly.

>>mwsher+W2
They have definitely left a lot of wiggle room and you'd be crazy to build stuff based on their patents without a licensing agreement, but I think this signals that they are very open to licensing their technology, and are not trying to "build a moat". This would be a lot more interesting if they were willing to state the terms on which they are willing to license the patents, but there are probably complex legal issues with saying so explicitly.

>>seldo+Z3
Easier would be if they created an online form or possibly a meatspace dropbox (to realistically prevent DDOSes) which auto-issues you a license to use their patents at zero monetary cost or cost of postage.