It's suicide to have a one-direction patent sharing agreement. The whole idea of patents these days is defensive patents to avoid mutual destruction. That's why patent trolls (companies that buy and hold patents, but don't actual make anything) are so bad for the industry.
It is also written such that if you, your affiliates, or related companies:
* sue anyone over anything EV patent related, or have a stake in someone who does,
* if you ever challenged, or had stake in a challenge to any patent Tesla currently holds, or buys in the future,
* or if you marketed or sold anything that imitates the design or appearance of a Tesla product, or provided any material assistance to someone else who did.
then you are forever excluded from the pledge.
Tesla summaries this as:
What this pledge means is that as long as someone uses our patents for electric vehicles and doesn’t do bad things, such as knocking off our products or using our patents and then suing us for intellectual property infringement, they should have no fear of Tesla asserting its patents against them.
but the actual legal definition goes way above "such as knocking off our products or using our patents and then suing us for intellectual property infringement".
It also has no time bounding, so that patent spat from the 1900s that Ford had probably counts.
Yes, I remember the wording being overly vague. But at the time Tesla was pushing it, they were pretty desperate for $$. I bet if someone had really helped build the supercharger network, they'd have been amenable to changes.
Looking at the way things played out, its obvious that they wouldn't faced competitive pressure due to this.
For the same reasons, the existing industry didn't bother. It was a long time before Ford took EVs seriously.
