People have been sharing heirloom variety seeds with each other for a long time, along with their local sourdough cultures, kefir mother cultures, yeast strains, and other re-propagatable biological source materials.
So it is great that professional horticulturists recognize the value of that enough to contribute their work to the system. Home-hobbyist gardeners/bakers/zymurgists/etc. simply don't have access to the same techniques used for commercial production.
It would also be great if a professional could curate a biological distribution package for food polycultures. A lot of people are familiar with the "three sisters" polyculture of corn, beans, and squash, but there are presumably others that would work just as well. Additionally, we now know that the microbiota of the soil itself can be as important as the genomes in the seeds. What if you could make your potting soil resemble Iowa corn field topsoil by pouring a few mL of open source dirt juice into it?
Having worked in R&D (molecular breeding dept) of <insert huge agribusiness> for 4 years, this article has highlighted that I do in fact suffer from Gell-Mann Amnesia.
There a great many things that this article gets wrong/not quite right, and yet I'll probably read the next NPR story and think "oh, that is interesting". http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...
This idea makes sense at first blush, at least to this non-plant-breeder.
At first I wondered how much of a difference it could or would make since while in software anyone can code in their free time, how many people can splice a gene? But if they get universities to join the effort so that work at that university has to result in Free seeds, I could see it catching on and working.
As a planter, I'd certainly prefer to have seeds that minimized risks of legal hassle.
I would also be curious to see what would happen when the reverse of one of Monsanto's legal attacks happened -- if Free seeds made their way into Monsanto's stock, could their legal attack on farmers be used against them? Or de-fanged?
It's insane that this isn't the default position. This is a very positive step but simultaneously depressing, highlighting the dire situation that Monsanto and friends have manoeuvred us into.
Strange that a practice that has been practiced for tens of thousands of years by cultures all over the world has to stake a legal claim for itself, and re-brand as "Open Source" in order to survive.
Very, very strange.
To be slightly pedantic, It's more like a GNU seed... And I would hesitate to call it the first, people have been doing this for millennia. But it's great to see push back against plant patents here.
I think this is bad, not because I don't like open source other things, but the patenting and commercialization of genes is something that we cannot permit. Establishing the difference between regular seeds and open source seeds is a step in the wrong direction, as there should never be a time that that distinction is necessary.
Staple crops are pretty important to the welfare of almost everyone in the country that uses them, right? Developing them is expensive and requires lots of people with high-grade scientific educations, right?
To me, that sounds like the kind of situation that would benefit from being made public. I mean, the theory makes sense: taxpayers share the burden of developing the plants they all consume. Something like the NSF's grant funding for most other science would work really well. This kind of situation would also facilitate a more permissive attitude toward sharing knowledge and seeds to help intellectuals and hobbyists (the same way universities make resources in other fields available to intellectuals and hobbyists).
Cool post.
But this idea isn't new at all.
In fact most of the "cheap" seeds you see on seed racks at stores like the dollar store are "open source". Seeds like Black Seed Simpson Lettuce and Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans for instance.
One has to remember that people have been breeding for thousands of years before seed patents came into being and there are many many patent free varieties. These are seldom are grown commercially because hybrids have preferable characteristics for commercial growers, but for home growers and smaller market gardens they have stood the test of time.
It is neat that people are continuing to do this with new varieties, but the concept is hardly novel and these are not even close to the "first open source seeds".
Interesting. I remember a few years ago, Craig Venter did something where he "signed" a genetic sequence with a specific code snippet to make sure the experiment worked as expected [1]. Do you think they could do something like that here to make sure nobody is using this in proprietary seed? In other words, insert a specific code in the DNA, then if there is ever a legal dispute about where the seeds came from, just sequence it and look for that code.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-...
Here's a link to OSSI — the Open Source Seed Initiative ⌘ http://www.opensourceseedinitiative.org/
This is an example of a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Its a "hardware solution" to a problem that at its root is a cultural assumption. The people who developed these seeds apparently needed to go the 'long way around' just to circumvent a preexisting absurdity with something as marginally absurd in hopes of incremental gains.
It's like fighting stupid with stupid where whoever is the most clever at it "wins".
I'm wondering if it is possible to "GPL" open-source seeds to nullify the Monsanto round-up ready canola seed issues. i.e. Imagine a thought experiment whereby GPLed seeds somehow make it into Monsanto's seed stock and over many generations ends up in a significant percentage of Monsanto seed.
Monsanto will cross-breed these immediately, right? :-D
I bought some tomatoes at the supermarket. I ate some of them and decided they were really tasty. I squeezed the squishy stuff from some of them into a bowl and fermented it to get the seeds out of their growth-inhibiting sacks. I planted these and now I have tasty tomatoes growing on my windowsill.
If anyone thinks they have any rights to these seeds that I paid for (as part of the tomatoes), they're wrong on several levels, and if there is legislation that says they're not wrong, that legislation is in dire need of repair.