...The Biological Innovation for Open Society (BIOS) initiative will seek to make information and technologies such as plant-breeding tools freely available. It will also provide scientists with better information about what they can access and, its founders hope, establish an international community of interested researchers.

Richard Jefferson is the initiative's leader and chairman of the Center for the Application for Molecular Biology to International Agriculture (CAMBIA), which is a non-profit research institute based in Canberra, Australia. He says BIOS could spur an "open source movement" in biotechnology, analogous to the one that has developed in the computer software industry.

Plant scientists in poor countries often complain that they are shut off from recent advances in agricultural biotechnology because they cannot afford licensing fees...

That's a quote from this article on Biological Innovation for Open Society. Considering how little genetically engineered crops are used in the developing world (guess who patents them in the West?), this is obviously a requirement in helping people grow crops more efficiently.

It's sort of inspiring to see IBM donating hardware for this. But will it assure that research will be done on crops specific to developing countries? That remains to be determined.

So, is that a GNU/Carrot, or are you just happy to see me?