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Free (As In Speech) Beer, V2.0
AgentPaper writes "Three years ago we discussed an open source brewing project in which a Danish brewer made his beer recipes available for public consumption and alteration. The concept has taken off, first with the 'Free Beer Project' in Denmark and now with Flying Dog's 'Collaborator' Doppelbock in the US, which was created via input from home brewers across the world. One version of the Collaborator is commercially brewed and available for purchase (and is darned tasty), but you can download the same recipe and labels, brew it yourself, and submit your mods back to the project."
It's fine and dandy to have Free (as in Speech) Beer, but I would certainly be better off with Free (as in Beer) Beer.
Free beer is only free if your time is worth nothing.
... was free beer recipies. It was "The Jolly Brewer" in postscript format made by people on alt.rec.brewing some time in the late 1980's or early 1990s. It was certainly before the web came along in 1992.
In some jurisdictions you need a license to brew beer. I doubt that's included...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
... listen to the bug reports for this one.
"*slurrred* We've been waiting on RC2 for years now and you still haven't fixed B..b..bug #272 Sporadic Bubble Popping. Lazy bastards, I'd fork if I could tell the difference between a fork and a spoon right now."
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
There are many of us who brew beer as a hobby. We have competitions. We help each other. We trade recipes and equipment. Some of us are a bit stingy with our beer though.
... I don't see the point.
There are university courses on beer making. Beer making is well understood. It is not at all like programming. All of the effort is in the programming, once the program is written, that's it, you're done. Beer recipes are fairly simple programs that don't change all that much between beers that are quite different. The goodness of the beer is determined by the skill of the brewer. Given the same recipe, two of us will produce different tasting beers.
How you heat and cool your beer determines how the different enzymes will work and that determines how the beer tastes (in addition to the obvious hops and barley). The exact temperature profile is a function of your equipment. Beer made in a large batch with steam heat and water cooling will be different from my five gallon batches.
Beer is a craft. It isn't the same as software because the same program (recipe) won't always produce the same result. The program I wrote yesterday will run the same any time of year. Beer, on the other hand, cares when I make it. Around here, we don't brew between May and October.
Creating an open source beer project
waiting for someone to bring microsoft into this discussion... its not a matter of if, but how and when
"1 pint ought to be enough for everyone"
I've been home brewing for nearly 20 years.
In my experience:
1. Most brewers (home and professional) have always been willing if not eager to share their recipes with other brewers.
2. Those brewers who do zealously guard their secret recipes usually don't make very good beer, and you wouldn't want their recipes anyway.
Do you go to the movies? If so, do you factor in the price of your time along with the tickets and popcorn?
When drinking beer, do you factor in the time it takes to drink it, as well as the cost of the beer itself? How about going out to dinner? Do you tack on an additional $100/hr for your time?
How do you pay yourself? It seems like it would get a bit circular. "Hey, Self, here's the $100 I owe you for the last hour. Don't spend it all in one place, you know you have payroll coming up in an hour!"
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
This sort of thing just shows how stupid the whole "free as in beer" v "free as in speech" thing is.
Beer is not free "as in beer". You have the pay for the stuff. It is, on the other hand, something that anyone can make and sell in a traditional manner without worrying about infringing any sort of patent or intellectual property belonging to the ancient people who invented it.
Speech is not free "as in speech". If I go and write a story about wizards called Harry and Dumbledore, I'll get sued. If I lie to your boss that you've been stealing from work and you get fired, I'll get sued.
We don't need such weird terms. "Free" in the first sense is simply an abbreviation of "free of charge", so just don't abbreviate it if you want to be clear. The Latin term "gratis" is also well-known in English.
If you absolutely insist on a term to specifically say the opposite, then "liber" is the perfect Latin counterpart to "gratis". There is also the derivative "liberal" which has several senses connected to freedom and generosity, and would be quite sufficient.