There was a message today on the OpenMoko community list from Roland Whitehead asking how well the OpenMoko community works. The reason for the query is really interesting!
I am working with the 40 Fires Foundation [http://www.40fires.org] to try to build a framework for the development of open source hardware. You might have heard that the first project is the “hyrban” car – a car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell – the prototype of which was revealed by Riversimple [http://www.riversimple.com] earlier in the summer and whose designs have been licensed to 40 Fires.
It appears that the plans for the car will be licensed under a Creative Commons license (though it’s not clear which variant – the current 40Fires wiki content is licensed under the 3.0-BY-NC version) though they do recognise that some components of the car may not be available under open source licenses. It does sound like an interesting project, will be interesting to see how it develops!
It’s hard to take Riversimple’s claim about sustainability seriously when they use ASP.NET on their website. Sustainability is all-encompassing, and if they overlook something as obvious as the engine running their website, who knows what other details they have overlooked.
Hopefully, apart from obtaining the designs, 40 Fires has as little to do with them as possible.
40 Fires project will be very interesting. IER is supplying one of the missing pieces- which is an affordable hydrogen fueling station. It’s only 20kW but that is enough to fuel a small fleet of riversimple cars.
That is the trick-there must be an end user system. A fueler and a fleet of fuel cell lake boats! a fleet of fc cars, a fleet of fc bicycles. Now the business has only to provide the location and rent the use devices
to the public and instant cash flow! which pays for the system and removes greenhouse gases for ever!!
It can be done- it just needs to be funded! -John Gotthold- co-founder/CTO-Independent Energy Research