Andrea Rossi again addresses the issue of open source in response to a comment from Remi Andre who appeals to him to release his IP to the world as a means to avert armed over energy — specifically in Syria. Rossi’s response:
I answered many times to this issue. To give away the IP will kill all the serious investments, for obvious reasons. We are making a rigorous work of test and validation and when it will have been finished our technology will reach a wide diffusion made by the concerns that now are investing because they have an IP.
My responsibility is to make this technology have the strongest possible backing to be really useful, not to go to the Nirvana. Honestly, I think we have to serve God not to go to the Nirvana, but to merit the life and give a sense to it. If you want to really diffuse a technology you need real backing, and no backing has ever been given to open source stuff. You have a paradigmatic example if you make a comparative analisys between Linus [Linux] and Microsoft. Should we give away the IP we would lose all the serious backers and should have a Brancaleon’s Armada of clowns
playing with it.About the situation in Siria, I do not agree with you. The situation in Siria is enormously more complex than you say, even if today they always say that whatever happens of bad is born by the bad guys dealing with energy. As a matter of fact the sociological evolution ( revolution?) in Africa and Middle East has much more complex origins: it is the difficult awakening of a people that disrupts equilibria made by leadind classes that have not understood the line of evolution of History. Energy plays a marginal role in this situation.
Thank you for your kind and persistent attention, for which I conserve gratitude.
This is all consistent with what Rossi has said in the past. His position that no one would put substantial financial resources behind his technology if they did not think that they would have exclusive rights to it, and without that backing the E-Cat could not be developed to the level it needs in order to make a positive difference in the world.
I had to look up the reference to Brancaleon’s Armada, and it refers to an Italian comedy movie (L’armata Brancaleone) about an inept army led by a knight, and the term has come to mean in Italian “a group of badly assembled and useless people.”
I am sure there are many who will disagree with Rossi’s comparison to Linux and Microsoft. Linux seems to have been a great success in terms of open source development, with Linux serving as the kernel for such widespread programs as Ubuntu and Android which are used all over the world. Software, however, is a very different medium than building hardware like LENR reactors, and it would be much harder to organize an open source manufacturing network than a purely digital one.
I know there are plenty of people who disagree with Rossi’s approach but it doesn’t look like Rossi has had any change of mind of the strategy he intends to take. If the mechanism that powers the E-Cat becomes common knowledge we may see how successful an open source LENR project would be.
