institutional-mission-statements/a-growing-culture-open-source-ethos-ag-heritage

Quote / Position

“Manifestations of open are seen in our agricultural heritage, owned by all and fabricated over generations. The boundless mixing of genetic materials seen in open pollination boosts the overall vigour of plants and regenerates the abundance of nature. There is also a long history of open in many traditional cultures around the world. Local knowledge, often collectively inherited, shared orally, and passed over jurisdictional borders and geographies, is the backbone of traditional agriculture and biodiversity preservation as farmers save and trade seeds — and it’s been at work for centuries. It is impossible to imagine claiming any presumptive ownership of our agricultural heritage; yet copyrights, patents, and breeders’ rights hinder the spread of indigenous seeds and continually fail to protect local knowledge.”

Context

A Growing Culture’s editorial framing is the conceptual bridge from software open source to agricultural heritage. The article makes explicit that the “open” ethos has multiple genealogies (software, scholarly, biological, cultural) and that the agricultural / biological lineage is older than the software lineage.

Worth knowing because talks about open-source AI in agrifood that frame it as a cultural fit (rather than as a foreign technical import) draw on this lineage. The A Growing Culture framing lets the presenter move from “open source software is a technical choice” to “open source software is a contemporary expression of an agricultural heritage that has been open for millennia.”

Source

A Growing Culture. The Open Source Ethos. Offshoot (Substack). January 25, 2023. https://agrowingculture.substack.com/p/the-open-source-ethos