This is a tough lesson for all the people who own these bikes, but this is what happens when you have a closed ecosystem and poor repairability. VanMoof should be forced to open source their proprietary designs and software so that independent repair shops/parts manufacturers/developers can attempt to fill the void.
Blows my mind that they haven’t already, maybe they’re hoping to be bought out?
The article says the founders are trying to restart it, so they’re probably not going to give up that IP to sell to an investor.
Even still, what’s the timeline for a company trying to restart itself before the better move is to open it up? Should there be some timeline like 6-12 months of being defunct before whoever owns it is compelled to make it open? They’re going to lost a bunch of momentum being shut down anyways, so maybe it’s better for them to make it open so that their community sticks around while they figure out how to get back in business?
That said, even if it’s opened up, it still might not fit in with the ecosystem of normal bicycle parts and therefore be mostly worthless/only relevant for an enthusiast. I doubt that whatever features they’ve got are that much better than what the cycling community can come up with in an open standardized way in the next couple years anyways.
Whatever happens, it kinda sucks for the people who bought into the proprietary system, but I hope they will have learned their lesson and know better for next time :)
I’d figure if they open sourced it, that’d only help them with bringing it back: Current customers would definitely view that favorably, as would anybody who happens to be paying attention. They could use some positive PR, especially right now.
