Open-Source Technique for GM Crops

a_d_white writes "The Biological Innovation for Open Society has developed TransBacter, a new technique for creating genetically modified crops, which is being released as a BioForge project. Their license allows anyone to use and improve the technique as long as improvements are shared with everyone, à la open source. Other techniques for creating genetically modified crops rely on Agrobacterium, but this new method allows using bacteria outside this genus. The New York Times and Wired cover the story. The founding of BIOS was mentioned previously. Although the Nature paper is available from the BIOS website, with their emphasis on the free sharing of ideas it's rather ironic that the technique was not reported in an open-access journal."

Comments

Funding?

[teiresias]

I understand BioForge is a place for scientists to collaborate but is it also a place for funding? Did the scientists who put together this article do so with funds from a University or (less likely) a corporation?

If more of these papers are to come out, and I hope they do, the proper funding channels should be lined up since those who fund a research project tend to be very possessive about the results.

Bad license

[Pan T. Hose]

Their license allows anyone to use and improve the technique as long as improvements are shared with everyone, à la open source.

This is foolish. They should have released it under a free license for anyone except those who deny the same right to use their bio-patents. Otherwise certain scums are able to use this technique while not being forced to change their behaviour, hurting the industry, hurting the farmers, hurting the scientific progress, with no consequences. A perfect license should be useful for cross-licensing with proprietary patents portfolios but sadly this one while being certainly great in spirit is just too weak in its current form to achieve this goal. In the real world of patent sharks we need to fight a little bit harder.