I have poor vision.

This website uses a herd-to-read font and disables pinch-to-zoom (an essential feature) on my iPad.

It seems to me that this press release was meant to invite interested parties to contact Tesla's legal department, though it didn't say so explicitly. If I ran a car company and saw this, that's what I would do, which I'm sure also didn't escape Tesla's notice. This press release seems more about announcing and explaining Tesla's intentions rather than acting as a binding agreement for a multibillion-dollar megacorp.

So an informal non-aggression pact is nice, but absolutely no automobile manufacturer would rely on that when a new car costs a significant fraction of a billion dollars to bring to market. (If I were a cynical man, I might think this didn't escape their notice.)

If it were me, and the true intent was to distribute the Tesla patents as widely as possible, I would have said "Tesla pledges to license its entire patent portfolio, on a worldwide non-exclusive no-royalty basis, to any interested party. We will ask for consideration in the amount of $1 for a 99 year license. Your lawyers and accountants can reassure you that these sort of symbolic commitments hold up in court. They'll also no doubt ask to see the full terms, which are about as boring as you'd expect, and which are available from our Legal Department."

I've been thinking of patents as nukes during the Cold War lately.

Superpowers (US/USSR, Apple/Google) acquire very large nuclear/patent arsenals under the guise of protection/defense. These arsenals are relatively cheap for superpowers to build, but they are expensive for small states (small countries/small businesses) to acquire.

The US and USSR were roughly equivalent in their arsenals so it made little sense for either party to act offensively. However, the implied power behind the arsenals gave them a lot of power when dealing with smaller actors. The superpowers benefit greatly from acquiring these arsenals. Even without using them publicly, the threat can always be used behind closed doors (as Jobs has been shown to do).

But there's a third actor; the most universally feared actor: terrorists/patent trolls. These actors behave only offensively because they have nothing to defend. These actors are best poised to benefit from nukes and patents and can send an otherwise orderly system into chaos.

Anyway, just a fun but flawed analogy to play with in your noodle. :)