Fighting the seed monopoly: 'We want to make free seed a sort of meme' By trade, Jack Kloppenburg is a sociologist and a professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Lately, however, his job has entailed packaging seeds and mailing them to farmers, in addition to his normal teaching and grading duties. This change in routine was prompted by the unexpected popularity of the recently launched Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) a project spearheaded by Kloppenburg and Wisconsin horticulture professor Irwin Goldman. In mid-April, the initiative released 36 seed varieties, all free from the patent restrictions that limit much of the seed commercially available today. "The thing went viral and it's all over the place now," Kloppenburg said. "We got 230 orders from eight countries, when we hadn't even anticipated selling any seed.
" The initiative's goal is to provide an alternative to the patent-protected seeds sold by major producers such as Monsanto and DuPont, most of which require buyers to sign agreements that create strict limits on how the seed can be used. David Lang: My underwater robot. De l'eau de mer qui devient potable avec cette invention Open Source qui va sauver des millions de vies. Le manque d’accès à l’eau potable est l’une des causes principales de mortalité dans les pays pauvres.
Durant ces dernières années, plusieurs efforts ont été déployés pour rendre l’eau de mer potable. Cela nécessitait des centrales qui consommaient énormément d’énergie et était inaccessibles aux pays pauvres. Le designer italien Gabriele Diamanti, a eu l’idée de rallier deux éléments naturels au service de l’environnement. Il a crée le « Eliodomestico », un éco-distillateur qui transforme l’eau salée en une eau potable grâce à l’énergie solaire.
Ce projet est destiné aux pays en développement et il permettra à ces populations d’accéder à de l’eau potable à moindre coûts, avec en prime une technique « Open Source ». Comment fonctionne le « Eliodomestico » ? Scope, not scale - Opinion. Chiang Mai, Thailand - The competitive dynamics of industrial capitalism are well-known, and they are all about scale. Producing more of a unit enables companies to drive the unit price down and thus outcompete the competition. Multinational corporations and global brands now have very complex value chains, in which various parts of a product are mass-produced in different parts of the world. Nevertheless, the system has obvious weaknesses. One weakness is that it tends towards monocultures, both agricultural and industrial.
One example is the dependence of the Chinese coastal economy on exports. Because competition drives prices down, the dominant western players changed their strategy in the 1980s. But there is, of course, a more fundamental problem: the whole system of globalising the advantages of scale fundamentally rests on cheap global transportation and, thus, the continuous availability of fossil fuels. This type of economic transition has played out before. The fall of Rome.
Creative Commons. Open Hardware. Open Software.