This is a copy of an answer I left on Larry Page’s Google Plus profile after another announcement about the progress of the self driving car:
How come you have a patent for the self driving taxi company in the USA? I always thought of you as a creative role model who wanted to change the world towards a better place.
Why not leaving the competition open? I really loved Jonathan Rosenberg’s blog entry in which you ask for openness. This inspired me in my PhD program a lot to make everything open.
I was so keen when you announced the self driving car as it was my childhood dream to have self driving cars in the world. (Visiting the United states in 2001 I learnt programming in high school and in my book I drafted my own first class Schema for a self driving car.)
After you announced the self driving car I was keen to build up the taxi company. Contributing to the progress in transportation and logistics and helping the process of automation.
There is much criticism against Google but after your recent TED talk I thought “Larry is really the guy who doesn’t care for money but wants to make progress to the world!” Before I often wondered why you didn’t take part in Bill Gates giving pledge. But I realized that you needed your capital for building stuff like the car or glasses. I thought that this is also an amazing way to change the world towards a better place.

In the talk you mentioned shared economy and too many cars in LA. I thought “Great, this is exactly where the Taxi company comes in.” and I was happy to realize that you already seem to have the same ideas. I even expected Google to create a taxi company.
Anyway please give the self driving car to the world and don’t own all the applications of it. Please build open systems and give people the chance to contribute to the ecosystem around the self driving car.
Closed systems will slow down the progress as you say yourself in the above mentioned blog article.