Free Beer
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| Type | Beer |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Independent |
| Country of origin | Denmark |
| Introduced | 2004 |
| Related products | OpenCola (drink) |
Free Beer, originally known as Vores øl - An open source beer (Danish for: Our Beer), is the first brand of beer with an "open"/"free" brand and recipe. The recipe and trademark elements are published under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license.
The beer was created in 2004 by students at the IT University in Copenhagen together with artist collective Superflex, to illustrate how concepts of the FOSS movement might be applied outside the digital world. The "Free Beer" concept illustrates also the connection between the long tradition of freely sharing cooking recipes with the FOSS movement, which tries to establish this sharing tradition also for the "recipes" of software, the source code. The "Free beer" concept received an overall positive reception from international press and media for the political message, was presented on many exhibitions and conferences, and inspired many breweries in adopting the concept.
In December 2004 a group of IT University of Copenhagen students together with Superflex brewed a 100-liter batch of a dark heavy beer in their school's cafeteria. The group labeled the beer Vores øl (Danish for: Our Beer), after a 1994 Carlsberg beer advertisement slogan. A website was created to promote the project and the beer's recipe and label designs were published under an open source Creative Commons license, specifically the CC-BY-SA 2.5 license. While unlike software cooking recipes aren't copyrightable the share-alike/copyleft licensing approach is legally questionable and untested in court. After the publication the project received an overall positive reception from international press and media for the political message.
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