I found the article pretty rewarding, here's my attempt at a summary:
The article is about the OSSI (Open Source Seed Initiative).
Since 1985 it's possible to get "utility patents" for plants. This allows you to claim that something like "easily harvestable broccoli" (say a breed with a specific shaped head) is your unique invention. Plant breeders are worried about the same chilling effects we see in software patents. Breeding something like "really red carrots" could get you sued. This is not an academic concern as thousands of patents are being filed.
Big companies are (naturally) treating the patent-ability of plant breeds and traits as a "land rush", an opportunity to lock away whatever profitable ideas they can. This is viewed as an encroachment on the commons by old-school plant breeders, who note that many of the specific things being patented have been worked on for decades (or maybe, thousands of years if you look at the big picture) in basically an open-source manner. They value seed freedom in the same way as a hacker might view freedom of code and ideas.
Plant breeding experts and enthusiasts have been working for years to oppose this trend, or at least carve out some reasonable exceptions, but things just seem to be getting worse.
Major "industrial" crops like corn and soybeans are pretty much locked down, covered by 500 and 250 patents respectively in 1999 (more today). Today, it would be hard to grow those in a commercially viable way without using someone's IP.
Now there is more interest in vegetables by multinationals. This seems much worse to OSSI because it covers a wider variety of "things people eat" and encroaches on non-industrial breeders and growers more.
Tired of lobbying and "slow change", the group in the article wanted to create a movement like the free software movement, but for seeds. However, there's no legal basis for copyleft in this area because patents are different from copyright. Copyright is automatic, allowing easy "copylefting". To apply this scheme to patents, they would have to apply for patents for each of their breeds or traits before they can dictate licensing terms, which would be onerous, expensive and still legally dubious.
The group couldn't find a way to construct a copyleft system for seeds, but they're still intent on creating and popularizing a movement. They're putting non-enforceable "shrink wrap" honesty licenses on their seed packets. Another avenue to preserve seed freedom is to focus on breeding "open pollinated" varieties (e.g. sexually reproduced), since these preserve genetic diversity and are harder to lock down with IP laws.
Fair comment, I just came to glance at the comments. According to the top of the article, it's a 37-minute read but it has to be longer. I started to scroll down with the pagedown key to get to conclusions, etc, but after holding down the key for 2-3 seconds I gave up on even scrolling to the bottom. The article is 7414 words.
It starts: "From a distance, Jim Myers looks like an ordinary farmer. Most autumn mornings, he stands thigh-deep in a field of wet broccoli, beheading each plant with a single, sure swipe of his harvest knife. But under his waders are office clothes, and on his wrist is an oversized digital watch with a push-button calculator on its face. "
The writing style is certainly engrossing, but we just don't all have time for such a length of reading.
At the risk of going into boring and meta (it's completely fair to downvote me for this), this is not a fair comment. If you don't want to read the article because it's long, don't. But, don't come in and complain that the article is long. Just ignore it. The people who do want to read it will. Let them comment about it.
Reading the article is the price of admission sometimes that price is high and sometimes it's low.
This is like commenting "Chemistry is boring" on an article about chemistry. Not interested. No problem. Go discuss something you are interested in or submit an article you do want to discuss.
It is, if you read it as a request for a summary. What, is there none? Is it all description?
If there is a 37-minute film about cryptography that is linked, would you expect everyone to watch it? Or would a request for a summary from someone who has, be fair?
The sentence I quoted ("From a distance, Jim Myers looks like an ordinary farmer. Most autumn mornings, he stands thigh-deep in a field of wet broccoli, beheading each plant with a single, sure swipe of his harvest knife. But under his waders are office clothes, and on his wrist is an oversized digital watch with a push-button calculator on its face") can be summarized as "Jim Myers studies broccolis" (or whatever the summary is.)
It is like commenting "is there an abstract somewhere?" when linked to a 300 page PDF that for some reason has none.
But that's plainly false, as I showed an example of. Type any work of fiction into Wikipedia and you will see a summary by someone who has done just that.
>> it provides a reasonable excuse for the delays, since nobody was able to take his succession immediately
> Huh?!? Open Source model not working or what?
I guess its only illusion and crazy lawyers who like to add anti-poaching clauses in employee contracts. If a company can't handle loosing their top engineers, clearly its the the proprietary model that is not working.
