Open Source is Business2.0

On Monday, Tesla Motors finally revealed the concept for a high-speed transit system called the Hyperloop. Inventor-entrepreneur-mad-scientist Elon Musk just released an alpha design of his vision for the future of high-speed transit.

The visionary high-speed train would get you from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 30 minute, and has been described as "a cross between a rail gun, the concord, and an air hockey table." Musk's inspiration for the Hyperloop was borne out of his distaste for another unrealistic, state-of-the-art transit proposals connecting  the two coastal cities. So he created something more in line with current limitations, borrowing heavily from already proven designs.

But the really interesting part of this story is that all the plans are open source. meaning that anyone can use or modify them.

"I really hate patents unless critical to company survival. Will publish Hyperloop as open source," Musk wrote on his Twitter feed. Anyone on the project, however, needs to "share philosophical goal of breakthrough tech done fast & w/o wasting money on BS."

Launching this project in an open source model is truly revolutionary, seeing as how intellectual property is one of companies most precious assets. It is usually the game changer in any speculative investor, how is hesitant to invest. Running open source deals this asset right out of the picture, however this does not seem to concern Musk. Nor has it scared any investors away. 

Regardless of whether the project succeeds or not, this marks an important step in innovations, and start-up evolution. As a supporter of most anything crowd sourcing, I personally think open sourcing plans is the way future. A large (but not to often talked about) part of Apples success is their open source policies; major parts of the Mac OS is built on open source programs. Combining open source plans with crowd sourced funding, and the business model of the future emerges. 

I give you Business2.0.