Re: [DIYbio] O'Reilly BioHacker Issue 4: Open Source Biotech Consumables

Unfortunately the situation is much more nuanced than that. Believe it or not, open-source is actually the money-making arm of the user-copyright-right-granting-centric free-as-in-libre-free software movement. Well, not really an arm, more like a cluster of ideas that often get mentioned all at the same time. So I would suggest to you that open-source licensing schemes are not opposed to revenue-generating activity, especially because commercial-use is one of the core features of open-source in many of the "industry consensus definitions" of open-source. Admittedly, business strategies that use open-source licensing schemes can quickly become nuanced and non-obvious, which is unfortunate and is what I suspect leads most people to think "open-source means you can't make money". And yet.... many do.

And as for patents..... the way that the intellectual property system is configured in the United States, and normalized throughout the rest of the world through various WIPO-related treaties, is that patent law "trumps" copyright law. Patent law is much stronger and covers real, physical objects whereas copyright often cannot. Open-source licensing schemes are based on copyright law. This has created a great deal of problems for engineers interested in building and releasing open-source hardware, because while they can use copyright licenses to make their hardware open-source, they are still vulnerable to patents and can't guarantee the same sorts of rights that patents can. You can apply open-source copyright licenses to reagent design and specifications, and you can try to attach it to the physical reagents themselves, but honestly you might have better luck using contract law to guarantee user and business rights in some sharable remixable way. Unfortunately this is still subject to patent law, independent of how you make money from open-source reagents.

Now that I have fully complicated the topic for you, I will take my leave :-).