Open Source Comes To Farms With Restriction-Free Seeds

29 crop varieties are now distributed under an open source license.

There are now 29 kinds of plant varieties that are available under an open source license, reports NPR. On Thursday, a group of scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison debuted the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI), a set of seeds that can be used by anyone so long as they don't restrict use by others through patents or IP protection.

The initiative is one answer to the heated battle between farmers and companies like Monsanto, which holds patents on plants that have features like resistance to certain herbicides or seeds that produce slightly different plants if they are resown from a first-generation crop. [...]