If the commercialisation involves extracting money from people who will gladly pay it to get better crop yields or lower fertiliser costs - like industrialised farmers in the first world - then it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
What would be a real shame is if the prices were set so that people in the third world could not use this advance to keep themselves and each other from falling into food poverty. However, food shortage is rarely about production capacity, and more often about allocation. Amartya Sen's work and all that.
Your second and third points are very good ones; it all depends on the implementation. I join you in hoping for a licensing strategy that maximises the social benefit of the technology.
And if you think there's a way to improve the efficiency of nitrogenase, that would be really welcome, since nature seems to have evolved it only once.
Upshot, without some serious plant engineering, at the very least using aggressive husbandry techniques, it's likely this tech will hit a hard ceiling in terms of usefulness.
It is a shame about the for-profit commercialization, but I think it's worth remembering that such things do sometimes result in faster implementation because the people working on it have more skin in the game. But either way, it will be public domain in 17 years worst case. I don't think that amount of time will make or break agriculture, and if you need 100% less fertilizer it's a pretty easy economic case.
There is more to fertilizer than just Nitrogen compounds so you would still need a fertilizer, it just wouldn't need to be as nitrogen rich. And the farmers will continue to over fertilize.
The smart corporate farmers don't over fertilize, it costs real money. Research the technology that they use, satellites, GPS and automated tractors/spray rigs that adjust in real time for specific soil needs.
Patents are good. Patent abuse is not. They need to be better regulated.
I think your analogy is flawed.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many above-average intelligent people are moving quickly yet don't seem to wonder about where they are actually going. I guess they're just not as lazy as I am. Me personally, I'd rather have enough idle land and unpolluted water for free range beef and wild fish, but I guess some people set their sights quite a bit lower.
But who says I disagree? Suggesting that improving agricultural efficiency is useless because of population growth is just a logical fallacy, a version of a Straw Man. You're suggesting that I don't think we need to reduce population, when what I'm actually saying is that this is independently a big deal. I believe they call this particular version of the Straw Man an "Appeal to Worse Problems".
And since nearly every post I see on here is about efficiency, and not sustainability, I'm compelled to offer another view point.
But yes, point taken that work to decrease population in a humane way is very important and underrated by technology driven people.
I generally agree with your comment, but I'd maybe say that "they can thrive in nitrogen-deficient soils". There are still other variables that affect the growth of nitrogen-fixers especially: soil pH; the quantity of other macro (and micro) nutrients like phosphorus, potassium, calcium, etc; and availability of water and sunlight.
Soybeans are a major crop that can fix nitrogen, but they may still need supplemental applications of phosphate, and the crop will die if not irrigated during a drought.
In other words: this is not a silver bullet that will magically make the problems of the world's crop-growers disappear overnight.
It might be hard to patent though. As far as I understood it you just need to infect the plants with the bacteria, and once the bacteria are out in the open, it will be hard to stop others from using them with or without intent...
Others have commented about the 'strong evolutionary advantage' this will convey crop species. I think that unlikely: a large number of species in the Fabaceae family (legumes) have the ability to form symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and this simply allows them to exist on nutrient poor soil. But because it's a symbiosis, i.e. the plant trades some of the sugar it produces for the nitrate fixed by the bacteria, it's not a cost-free situation. Legumes don't dominate many habitats, but they do OK in very nutrient poor soils.
Modern crops don't perform well outside intensively nurtured field conditions. N-fixed crops will require less intensive nitrogen supplementation than before, but they will still perform poorly when competing against wild plants.