Just read an article on electric cars in of the Saturday’s edition of the NRC – a Dutch newspaper, which can be found online at the authors blog (in Dutch). Some entrepreneur in electric cars is mentioned by the name of Alef Arendsen. The name did not immediately rang a bell, but when it was mentioned got his wealth after the sale of a opensource software company he co-founded I recalled. Alef Arendsen was part of SpringSource, early on and made Spring big in the Netherlands (hm, I think I’ve read about the framework in about 2004 on javaworld, found it pretty cool – too bad I didn’t do anything anything with it by then). He quit SpringSource about a year ago because he wanted to do something else.
He has now started a company in electric cars: The New Motion, which he mentions in his blog: Challenges when introducing new technologies to the market. Quite a surprising move, but then again, you could say Electric cars are to traditional Petrol cars as Spring is to EJB2/J2EE.
(Above picture from Wikipedia – of course electric cars aren’t actually new, just as the idea dependency injection or reversion of control existed long before spring)