| Title | Vegetable Breeders to Open-Source Seeds | |
| Date | Friday April 18 2014, @03:51AM | |
| Author | n1 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the freedom-for-the-food dept. | ||
A US-based group of plant breeders is launching an initiative to start open-sourcing seeds from new crops, starting with "29 new varieties of 14 different crops, including carrots, kale, broccoli and quinoa."
Irwin Goldman, a vegetable breeder at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of the organizers of the initiative, described the reasons for the move.
It's an attempt to restore the practice of open sharing that was the rule among plant breeders when he entered the profession more than 20 years ago.
"If other breeders asked for our materials, we would send them a packet of seed, and they would do the same for us," he says. "That was a wonderful way to work, and that way of working is no longer with us."These days, seeds are intellectual property. Some are patented as inventions. You need permission from the patent holder to use them, and you're not supposed to harvest seeds for replanting the next year.
The details are at the Open Source Seed Foundation site. The OSSI Pledge is much shorter than the GPL, but similarly to the GPL it prohibits making proprietary varieties from OSSI seeds.
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