Free und Open Source Plants

The FLOSS culture in Germany is big, and there are also quite some people doing commoning.

But there is one thing that is in dire need of more common property: seeds.

The world of seeds is becoming more and more centralized, a handful of international companies controlling the market and the number of different plants shrinking. Genetic information is being lost, not to mention dependence of farmers all around the world on the profit interests of people who have no interest in those farmers at all.

Sometimes the loss of genetic information is actively done by the corporations. For example when a patent on a plant runs out, the company stops distributing the seeds so that farmers cannot breed the plants themselves in time. The plant sort disappears and the farmers have to buy a newly patent sort.

In the US there is OSSeeds, they distribute free (as in speech) seeds. But their license does not forbid to patent breeds derived from their seeds.

So a German group has decided to make it better, to produce seeds that will be free forever, based on the same legal "trick" (and often wording) as copyleft-software.

Sunviva

Meet Sunviva, which is a tomato even if it looks a bit more like a small sun.

Resistant against several blights, that yellow tomato is unlikely to be grown in big glass halls or sold in the supermarket - buyers would be too surprised by the color. But Sunviva is one step to truly free seeds, now buyable at opensourceseeds.org who also have a free sort of wheat, forever in the public domain.

A small growth for a plant, but a huge growth for mankind ;)

source (de)