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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Is there a FSF equivalent for GMO?

Like code, I'm sure there's potential benefits to GMO. Like code, I'm sure that letting opaque corporations monopolise production with their patented technology will lead to lots of bad behaviour that's anti-consumer and potentially catastrophic.

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Patents for plants expire relatively fast, then the problem is to keep up seed production - code can be copied forever, seeds have to be 'made'. Costly especially if your plants' yield depends on hybrid vigor, which is lost in subsequent generations, in that case you have to recross the two parental lines to make more seeds.

Having said that, there is the Open Source Seed Initiative: https://osseeds.org/ (you still have to buy the seeds since there is a cost associated with production and shipping)

There are also special licenses for some GM plants, for example, if you're a seed company from a poor country you can get the license for golden rice (extra Vitamin A) for free, not the seeds themselves, you have to make those.

>> if you're a seed company from a poor country you can get the license for golden rice (extra Vitamin A) for free, not the seeds themselves, you have to make those.

How convenient....what about not paying any license at all regardless of the "golden" seeds you produce?

Presumably the idea is to have seed companies who can afford the license pay for the R & D cost so that it can be subsidized for poorer countries.

I see it more like enslaving poorer countries to always pay licenses(as much as they can). These poor countries will always be at the mercy of some corporations.

I don't see how they could ever develop their own seeds if the licensors increase the license price. See the "pharma bro" case (Martin Shkreli). I bet the U.S. gov wouldn't be that upset if the customers were from a shwhole country.

How do free licenses enslave poor countries to always pay licenses?

"the first hit is always free"

Who decides when they need to start paying and what thought process do they apply to that decision? Profit maximisation probably involves putting alternatives out of business first.

Similar to how Microsoft and Adobe we're okay with piracy in developing nations on the basis it would kill competition and they'd get paid later.

Are the free licences perpetual or time limited?

Is Darth Vader going to alter the deal further?

No, the idea is to expand the rent-seeking on copyrights and patents to staple foods.

AFAIK, Golden Rice is a spin-off from university research and not owned by the big agriculture companies, so I think you are wrong in at least this instance. It's really no different from Qt being available both under the GPL and a less restrictive commercial license.

Sure, gene patents and proprietary software are both manifest evil, but not everyone working within the existing framework is acting maliciously.

That's an exceptional situation in that they determined that they weren't going to be making money on it so they instead turned it in to a pro-GMO PR exercise.

Read more on this here:

http://www.goldenrice.org/Content1-Who/who4_IP.php

So your claims about ownership appear to be false, and you still need a license.

I'm not sure about the "not making money" -> "use it as PR" causality. From that website, it reads like the researchers retained the right to make it available to poorer countries when they sold the patent, i.e. before Syngenta found that they wouldn't be making money with it. So I don't think it is fair to accuse them (the researchers) of only doing it for the PR.

As well as the researchers' patent, actually growing golden rice requires licences for a thicket of patents on the underlying technology from dozens of companies (and it required some wrangling to even get permission to license that patent for free since the government grants they got would usually require commercial licensing). They managed to get free licenses to those as, basically, a PR exercise - it was worth it to all those companies to do it because it let them spin opponents of their profitable products as monsters who wanted third world people to suffer. The licenses also had conditions that made them basically unusable, so if someone did miraculously manage to make golden rice viable they didn't have to worry about losing out on their cut.

You still have to buy the seeds; however, once you do they belong to you to plant, create your own stockpile, share with others, crossbreed or use selective methods to create a better strain for your specific environment/needs...

The threat of GMO is not in direct health effects, it's in corporate control of the food chain.

Isn't that threat independent of how the seeds are developed? Corporations have controlled the food chain in the US for a lot longer than GM techniques have been around.

There's a lot more centralization of ownership in farming than there used to be - and the way in which you obtain your seed is one of the biggest examples of that.

What does that have to do with GM? Doesn't this business model for seeds predate GM crops?

No the business model is very different now in some key ways. First, I'm not aware of any seed manufacturers having any motivation or ability to prevent the genetics in your seed from spreading before. They didn't license what you could and couldn't do with descendants of your crop. They were suppliers of materials (seeds), not licensors of the genetic code they contain. It's quite analagous to buying and owning a BSD CD with freedom to do what you want with minor conditions vs buying a license to possess a music CD and listen to the music under certain conditions. Second, the higher barrier to entry and how recently GM became a factor (and how significant the advantages are, especially the short-term ones) has essentially allowed a monopoly to form, and there's even less competition than there used to be.

Do you see GM crops as a short-term or a long-term problem then? As technology improves and the barrier to entry decreases, that should also help with the ownership/leasing issue.

I don't see GM crops themselves as a problem at all. I think they come with some potential downsides that deserve some special consideration we haven't had to do before. Maybe the monopolization will decrease eventually, maybe Monsanto will be able to push out potential competition before it becomes viable. We'll see. But generally speaking this issue of licensing genetics is new territory. What if they spread organically? What if we become too dependent on too few crops - all our eggs in one basket that might have long-term effects we don't know about yet. I'm just pointing that the open-source analogy was actually pretty good - open-source has benefits but you have to make sure it gets funded to compete. The money has to come from somewhere, and you need to make sure it's not so low-quality that it starts causing it's own problems.

Aren't the licensed crops generally designed to not spread organically?

We're already dependent on too few crops. Genetic modification gives us more ways to increase diversity and preserve crops that would otherwise fall out of use.

I've definitely seen cases where someone was accused of distributing seeds to a nearby farm but claimed they hadn't. I'm inclined to believe that's at least possible. To quote the mathematician from Jurassic Park, "life will find a way" - he's not wrong.

Which incidentally, is how a lot more open-source software used to be. You had to pay for the original CDs to help cover the costs of distribution, etc. but you were then free to do what you wanted with it - even share it with others for free if you wanted and were okay to cover the cost of doing so yourself.

Unfortunately, the usefulness of both herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant GMO crops also expires relatively fast as weeds and insects develop resistance.

But you can slow down that process by crop rotation, for example in canola there are many known resistance genes for blackleg (fungus) infections. Farmers are in many places advised to rotate their canolas to different resistance genes so the fungus cannot build up resistance so quickly

See for example https://grdc.com.au/resources-and-publications/groundcover/g...

I cannot find any data where that particular fungus has gained and then subsequently lost its resistance to a plant resistance gene, but it wouldn't be impossible as long as the particular plant variety is not sown

Also, as the known GMO opponent Nassim Taleb points out, it's better to avoid unknown downsides completely that happen while chasing small gains from an unproven technology. GMO has a big downside with a small upside to it.

Known GMO opponent with no formal training in biology or agricultural science and a long history of lobbing ad homs at his opponents instead of having open discussions with them.

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