Also, related: <a href="https://www.opensourceecology.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.opensourceecology.org/</a><p>From their About page:<p><i>We’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and sharing our designs online for free. The goal of Open Source Ecology is to create an open source economy. [...]<p>OSE (Open Source Ecology) is currently developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker. In the process of creating the GVCS, OSE intends to develop a modular, scalable platform for documenting and developing open source, libre hardware – including blueprints for both physical artifacts and for related open enterprises.<p>The current practical implementation of the GVCS is a life size LEGO set of powerful, self-replicating production tools for distributed production. The Set includes fabrication and automated machines that make other machines. Through the GVCS, OSE intends to build not individual machines – but machine construction systems that can be used to build any machine whatsoever. Because new machines can be built from existing machines, the GVCS is intended to be a kernel for building infrastructures of modern civilization.</i>
Most of what you'd call open source seed are varieties produced through university research programs. Independent seed farmers reproduce and sell the seed in commercial level quantities.<p>I think this license is potentially important. There are commercial seed companies taking these public varieties, renaming them and selling them as their own product. There is nothing technically wrong with that.<p>However where it gets sticky is where they place legal demands on the farmer buying and planting the seed. If the open source license prohibited them from doing that it would be a very good thing.<p>If somewhere on the bag they had to put the public name the university assigned that would help. Farmers sometimes plant seed from two different companies and think they're spreading diversity risk when in fact they're planting the same variety!
I’m a hemp farmer. I definitely believe we need some kind of system like this to prevent corporations from monopolizing certain phenotypes. Sadly, I can’t see this working very well in practice for our industry. Cultivars already go to great lengths to protect their unique strains. Which is unfortunate for a lot of research on the endocannibinoid system.
I'm not sure 'open source' is a very good qualifier to use in the name of this project. I read the license, and I'm not seeing anything analogous to 'source'. It doesn't appear that any details about the development of the seed has to be shared along with the rights to use the seed.<p>If I'm not mistaken here, this just looks like a copyleft license, which is a totally separate concern from 'open source'.
The problem with this is that there's no legal mechanism to enforce it besides (perhaps!) contract law.<p>If an entity receives the seeds without the contract attached, it can hardly be considered to have agreed to the terms. The providing party may be in breach of contract, but there's no way to bind the receiving entity. A single 'rogue' link in the chain makes it all meaningless.<p>Of course, a variety would have to be truly spectacular for any company to take the effort and PR risk to get involved in that kind of shenanigans, so this approach may have some practical, if not legal, efficacy.<p>Ironically, a potentially stronger way to enforce the license terms would be to... patent the varieties. It's a quagmire of varying rules internationally, though, and there are some exemptions for the use of protected varieties in further breeding of varieties that could then be protected and subject to less 'free' terms. Plants won't ever be subject to the GPL.<p>I'm very sympathetic to the project's aims, but even on a purely ethical basis there is room for argument. If we want more plant varieties to be produced to tackle humanity's next challenges (and... we do), should we not be encouraging companies to make very significant, long-term investments in breeding efforts? It's hard to see how that can happen without some kind of time- and scope-limited intellectual property rights, even if the systems we have now aren't ideal.
It's bizarre there is a need to come up with "open source" seeds, to counteract the insanity of "patented" seeds. But I guess until patents on genes will be forbidden for good, it's necessary.
>Three requirements have to be met for the licensing:
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> The variety must be new.<p>I'm curious, what's the legal status of existing varieties that aren't patented?
Is this related to the OpenAg thing that was discussed on HN earlier? Because as I recall, there were quite a few doubts about how that sort of thing would work.