[TallGuyShort]

No the business model is very different now in some key ways. First, I'm not aware of any seed manufacturers having any motivation or ability to prevent the genetics in your seed from spreading before. They didn't license what you could and couldn't do with descendants of your crop. They were suppliers of materials (seeds), not licensors of the genetic code they contain. It's quite analagous to buying and owning a BSD CD with freedom to do what you want with minor conditions vs buying a license to possess a music CD and listen to the music under certain conditions. Second, the higher barrier to entry and how recently GM became a factor (and how significant the advantages are, especially the short-term ones) has essentially allowed a monopoly to form, and there's even less competition than there used to be.

[daveFNbuck]

Do you see GM crops as a short-term or a long-term problem then? As technology improves and the barrier to entry decreases, that should also help with the ownership/leasing issue.

[TallGuyShort]

I don't see GM crops themselves as a problem at all. I think they come with some potential downsides that deserve some special consideration we haven't had to do before. Maybe the monopolization will decrease eventually, maybe Monsanto will be able to push out potential competition before it becomes viable. We'll see. But generally speaking this issue of licensing genetics is new territory. What if they spread organically? What if we become too dependent on too few crops - all our eggs in one basket that might have long-term effects we don't know about yet. I'm just pointing that the open-source analogy was actually pretty good - open-source has benefits but you have to make sure it gets funded to compete. The money has to come from somewhere, and you need to make sure it's not so low-quality that it starts causing it's own problems.

[daveFNbuck]

Aren't the licensed crops generally designed to not spread organically?

We're already dependent on too few crops. Genetic modification gives us more ways to increase diversity and preserve crops that would otherwise fall out of use.

[TallGuyShort]

I've definitely seen cases where someone was accused of distributing seeds to a nearby farm but claimed they hadn't. I'm inclined to believe that's at least possible. To quote the mathematician from Jurassic Park, "life will find a way" - he's not wrong.