FOSS to electric cars: not such a big leap

By Sam Varghese
Friday, 01 February 2008 07:12

Opinion and Analysis

Richard Keech was an early adopter of Linux on the desktop back in the 1990s. One could well say that he has a habit of looking at something and getting into it if he thinks it's going to be a future trend, one that could be useful and sensible.
Keech, who works for Red Hat as principal consultant, and has been with the company for eight years - he was earlier with CyberSource, one of Melbourne's premier open source companies - now has a new target.

That is an electric car - and he's careful to point out that his involvement in any environmental activity has nothing whatsoever to do with his employer.

His migration (a nice programming word, that) to the environmentally sensible way began after he saw Al Gore's seminal film on climate change last April.

It was enough to  convince him - as it has thousands of others - about the dangers of climate change and that the way of future does not lie with a finite resource like petroleum.

It may sound somewhat strange to be talking about peak oil at Australia's national Linux conference - but Keech could find a parallel between a change from proprietary to FOSS software and moving away from petrol.

"Look at it this way: it's just that once again the status quo is not good enough for me. I was prepared to be a little different in choosing to use free and open source software and now I'm once again prepared to be different by using an electric car."

Keech is not an effusive sort; when he is convinced that something is good, he does plenty of research and then chooses a way by which he can incorporate it into his private life. Later, he does what he can for society.

His first act has been to sell one of his two cars - a six-cylinder - and bought a turbo-diesel one instead. "It uses half the fuel and is much better in terms of efficiency, he says.

And he is in the process of getting his second vehicle converted to use electric power.