
Linux for Lettuce - plinkplonk
http://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2014/05/linux-lettuce
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theophrastus
Lots of opportunity for extended terminology quibbling with this one. This
article ends up equating "Linux" with 'open source (licenses)', (and
"hackers"..?). Concluding that applying the same approach for agriculture,
specifically seed production, would be a good thing, (which likely it would
be). Perhaps the authors should arrange to lock Mr Torvalds and Mr Stallman in
a small room together to appreciate their 'equivalence'.

"... One fateful morning in Minneapolis, Michaels awoke with a Linux-inspired
epiphany: What if we did the same thing with our seeds? Just like hackers, he
and his colleagues would make their germplasm “free” by attaching a license
that kept it in the public domain."

~~~
capnhooke
Although, how cool would it be if we could git clone a genome and then grow a
plant based off of that? Maybe we should get them all in a room together...

------
kefka
All this started with General Electric and Chakrabarty winning the patent case
against the Patent Office over patenting life forms.

If it wasn't for SCOTUS going in favor of Chakrabarty, we would not be in this
mess.

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mizzao
This seems like a rather important issue that few people know about. The fact
that the majority of the crops being planted today are the intellectual
property of and controlled by some monster GMO food companies really means we
could end up in a bind in the future.

"Food Inc."
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc.))
is an excellent documentary that explains some of the major problems with this
system.

