I started this post while editing Open Sesame, but got caught up in the whirlwind of the film's release. I found the draft again this month while digging through the site's archives. The ideas have aged well, so I decided to finish it.
You've probably heard the term 'open source' even if you aren't completely sure what it means. It gets tossed around a bit too frequently and is often misused.
"Open source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available and licensed with an open source license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose." That's the Wikipedia definition.
Open pollinated seeds are by their nature open source. Open pollinated varieties are seeds that are neither patented nor owned by anyone. In that way they are similar to open source software.
However it is not even necessary to license open pollinated seeds (unless you consider Nature having bestowed her license in allowing us the knowledge to grow from seed). Once you grow an open pollinated seed into an adult plant, you can keep saving seed from that plant and continue to grow it out, year after year, for as long as you like. Nobody has to grant you permission. The permission is in the seed.
There are some who might bristle at the idea of seeds as the software of food. If so, I can understand their perspective. Seeds have been sacred for as long as we have grown food, although treated much less so in the past one hundred years. Nevertheless, I feel that open source and free software has some powerful lessons that we can learn from as we look for solutions in keeping seeds open and accessible to all.
Here's the problem. Saying a seed is "free" isn't enough, and the software world learned that the hard way. There's a distinction the free software movement makes: free as in speech, not free as in beer. A thing can cost nothing and still not be free, because the next person down the line can take it, enclose it, and lock the door behind them.
That's not hypothetical for seed. That's the entire history of the last century. Varieties bred in public universities with public money, refined by farmers over generations, quietly absorbed into private collections and re-emerging as proprietary lines. An open pollinated variety is free until someone breeds one generation past it and patents the result.
The software answer to this was slightly sneaky. It's called copyleft. Rather than putting the work in the public domain, where anyone could take it and close it, you license it with one condition attached: you may use this, change it, sell it, do as you like. But whatever you make from it must carry the same freedom forward.
The Open Source Seed Initiative was formally established in May 2012, founded by Jack Kloppenburg, Irwin Goldman, Claire Luby, Thomas Michaels, Frank Morton, Jonathan Spero, Alejandro Argumedo and Jahi Chappell. Kloppenburg, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, had been writing about seed enclosure for decades.
They started out trying to write a real license — a seed GPL, legally binding, enforceable in court. They abandoned it. Too complex, too expensive to defend, too much lawyer standing between a farmer and a packet of seed.
What they built instead is the OSSI Pledge, and it fits on a seed packet:
"You have the freedom to use these OSSI-Pledged seeds in any way you choose. In return, you pledge not to restrict others' use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other means, and to include this Pledge with any transfer of these seeds or their derivatives."
That's copyleft, in fifty-one words, with no attorney required. Use it however you want. Don't lock it up. Pass the promise along with the seed.
Where it stands now
OSSI is still going. There are pledged varieties available from seed companies across the country, with new ones added every year (fifteen in 2026 alone). You can buy OSSI-pledged seed today and know that whatever a breeder makes from it stays open for whoever comes next.
The Pledge is not a contract. Nobody is getting sued for breaking it. It works through norms, reputation and the decency of a fairly small community. Against four companies that control roughly half the world's commercial seed, a pledge on a packet is not a fair fight.
But it was never meant to be the whole answer. It's a way of building a protected commons, a body of genetics that stays open by design while the enclosure continues everywhere else. Every pledged variety is one that can't be taken.
And the legal side has finally started to move. This July, a bill landed in Congress, the Fair Seeds for Farmers Act, that would end utility patents on plants outright and void the contracts that forbid farmers from saving seed. Now that is a long time coming. I wrote about it separately, in the context of the OSGATA lawsuit. It probably won't pass this session. But this essential issue finally has a bill number.
Where the analogy breaks
Seeds are not software. Software doesn't feed anybody directly. It doesn't carry ten thousand years of somebody's grandmother deciding which plant to keep. It isn't (necessarily) sacred, and seed is — the people I interviewed for this film were unanimous about that, in about nine different vocabularies.
So no, I don't want to reduce a seed to a program. That's the trade that got us here in the first place: treating the living thing as an information product, and then noticing that info products can be owned.
The free software people faced a question we're still facing: how do you keep something open when openness alone makes it easy to take? They worked out an answer, and it wasn't a law. It was a condition attached to a gift.
Which is not a software idea at all. It's how seed has moved between human hands since the beginning: here, take this, grow it out, and pass some along.
The software people just took the concept and wrote it down.