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Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space.
For nearly 20 years, Morton's work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding. The patents weren't just for different types of lettuce, but specific traits such as resistance to a disease, a particular shade of red or green, or curliness of the leaf.
Such patents have increased in the years since, and are encroaching on a growing range of crops, from corn to carrots — a trend that has plant breeders, environmentalists and food security experts concerned about the future of the food production.
https://ensia.com/features/open-source-seeds/
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 29 2016, @06:00AM
Well, the specific pledges involved in this project certainly fall far short of meeting the Free Software definition, but no source code? How do you figure?
The DNA is in a very real sense the "source code" to an organism. Closer to raw machine code than something high-level, but the information is there, and we've learned how to insert, remove, and modify specific "functions", though it's often kind of trial-and-error at first.
Certainly DNA won't "just work" on its own, but neither does assembly, C, etc. You need an interpreter and/or compiler toolchain to convert the source into something functional. And not just any toolchain, but one compatible with the specific language you're using. Likewise, for an organism you need a compatible interpreter to convert a DNA sequence into an organism - specifically a compatible ovum.
You can even do all your gene-tweaking in a completely digital form on a pc, get the DNA just the way you like it, incorporate any "genetic libraries"(aka genes or gene groups) you wish, and then, when you're ready to "compile" an organism, have the DNA synthesized and injected into a compatible denucleated ovum, which you can then grow into a mature organism.
How is that not "source code"?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @06:15AM
In order to do that, you will need the data.
As already stated:
even the gene sequence to manufacture a copy by non-natural means is not available
When that has been uploaded and made openly available, -then- we can start arguing the fine points of "Open Source".
Until then, this isn't anywhere near the mark and is just using an inappropriate term.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 29 2016, @03:17PM
That would certainly make direct editing slightly more convenient for those well versed in the language. But the source *is* unavoidably distributed with every copy of the organism, available to sequencing for a modest fee (I believe it was a few thousand dollars last time I noticed, might well be notably cheaper by now). And as I'm fairly certain that synthesizing fresh DNA is considerably more expensive, you can hardly argue that sequencing is cost prohibitive.
Furthermore, it sounds like the preferred editing method among the group is currently cross-breeding, which does not involve manually editing the source code anyway - after all the toolchain already integrates some wonderfully robust genetic algorithms for directed code modification even by amateurs, requiring only that they implement the desired selection criteria. And with that technique you'd need to re-sequence every improvement anyway, since you don't know what bits of code were actually incorporated from the parents to get the achieved result.
Really the key question is, "Does the license qualify as Open Source?". I mean so long as the source and license are available, Free Software is still Free even if nobody has actually worked on it in decades. And given the trend toward patent encumbrance in the agricultural industry, that is the one portion of the trend that's actually threatened.
And frankly on that front I'd have to say that it sounds to be sort of creative-commons non-commercial. So Open Source, but not Free Software.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday December 29 2016, @07:26PM
By that logic, the source code is included with every binary release of software. You can always disassemble the executable. While the code they provide isn't the original C or whatever, it's still code, right? Even raw binary is code...
Open Source isn't about being able to go through some expensive and difficult process in order to *recover* the source code from the product. It's about the source code being provided directly in a usable and easily modified form. It's not just about being able to compile and execute the code provided, but about being able to modify that code into something different too.
The DNA isn't the source code, it's the binary. The seed is a hardware appliance with that binary pre-installed. The source code is a description of the steps taken to create that DNA, in such a way that you can either follow those exact steps and get the same organism, or adjust those steps to create a different organism that better fits your requirements.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 30 2016, @06:09AM
I do not for a moment dispute that it would be wonderful to have as much digital-format code as possible - but that's strictly a research tool and a convenience for a very narrow selection of expert-class "programmers". If you have the knowledge to edit the DNA directly, and access to DNA synthesis tools needed to bring your digital edits to life, then you almost certainly have ready access to the sequencing tools as well. The process is completely non-transformative in either direction, it's just format shifting. A slightly more complicated version of copying the same data from CD to hard disc, made more complex only by the fact that very few computers have the hardware necessary to read or write DNA.
There is no reverse engineering involved, at least not in a software sense. The "machine code" is in fact the original source, and the preferred format for editing - all pre-bundled with the entire toolchain. It's only if you want the precision of direct analysis or editing of the code that you need to convert the data to to the electronic domain. And there is no "higher level" language to "decompile" into if you do so - it's just a great big snarl of poorly understood spaghetti code written in bio-hexadecimal by billions of years worth of random transcription errors.