Tamrat, thank you for a thoughtful response!

I fully agree that the future is in new open source format. Thus I agree with you optimism and support of WikiHouse project.

However, what I’m concerned about is the transition period: whether we could get to the “building of the future” through small incremental steps, or it would require a more integrated R&D investment.

I tend to think that in the next 5–10 years there’s a strong need for a comprehensive investment into designing a new modular construction system practically from scratch. Open source projects might not be able to coordinate their efforts and funding enough to create a leapfrog hardware + IoT infrastructure. I’d be happy to be wrong though!

In conclusion, I’d bet on a few larger companies or startups investing in R&D and pioneering new modular standards, and then turning them into API or even fully open-source. In fact, Tesla did just that by opening its patents.

Thanks again for raising a very interesting point!