Proprietary and public are not mutually exclusive.
CSIRO (Australia's science and technology research agency) developed WiFi and made the design "public". However, they also held a patent for that technology.
After other companies adopted WiFi as the standard, CSIRO went to the biggest users (BroadCom, AT&T, Lenovo, etc) and sued them for patent infringement. [1]
There are a few things that Tesla could do here. If they are building all of the charging infrastructure, and other manufacturers use the Tesla proprietary plug, does that mean other chargers can automatically use it as well? If not, that removes those players from the market - but as I understand it, Tesla chargers are way better anyway.
I'm sure Ford and GM lawyers are all over the potential implications of this in the future, but I think it's best not to consider public and proprietary as completely orthogonal.
CSIRO (Australia's science and technology research agency) developed WiFi and made the design "public". However, they also held a patent for that technology.
After other companies adopted WiFi as the standard, CSIRO went to the biggest users (BroadCom, AT&T, Lenovo, etc) and sued them for patent infringement. [1]
There are a few things that Tesla could do here. If they are building all of the charging infrastructure, and other manufacturers use the Tesla proprietary plug, does that mean other chargers can automatically use it as well? If not, that removes those players from the market - but as I understand it, Tesla chargers are way better anyway.
I'm sure Ford and GM lawyers are all over the potential implications of this in the future, but I think it's best not to consider public and proprietary as completely orthogonal.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/how-the-aussie-g...