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Open Source Beer Served Cold, With a Heated Licensing Discussion
sethopia writes "Sam Muirhead enjoys a couple of open source beers and delves into their licenses (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA) and the recent CC Non Commercial license controversy. As Sam writes, 'Depending on your point of view, the Non Commercial license is either the methadone that can wean copyright junkies off their all-rights-reserved habit, or it is a gateway drug to the psychedelic and dangerously addictive world of open source and free culture.'"
Is that Free as in beer, or Free as in beer?
http://www.jibble.org/cookies.php
I thought recipes weren't copyrightable anyway, and only particular encodings of recipes could be copyrighted.
Beer recipes are generally not that secret, visit a brewery and you're generally shown the full process and ingredients. It's true that most don't give the recipe away, but if you know your brewing it's not hard to reproduce. If you get talking to a brewer and show some interest they'll point you in the right direction. I might be ignorant, but I've never heard of a brewer suing another brewer over a recipe or beer making process. Most brewers are happy to share. Yeast is another matter, many breweries closely guard their yeast, but others give it away.
CC 'non-commercial' strikes me as actually overwhelmingly different, in terms of objectives and in terms of the interactions being planned for(or against) than the more software-focused GPL/LGPL/BSD/MIT crowd:
With the software-focused licenses, the thinking(regardless of which camp you fall into on the questions of which interests you value most highly) is really about the relationship between the original developer, intermediate bundlers/distributors, and end users. Some licenses(ie. BSD) prefer to impose basically no restrictions beyond attribution on the intermediate users, considering it sufficient that the original developer can do what they want, and the end user(while they may or may not have any access to the guts of whatever binaries they get from the intermediate bundlers) does have access to the original project. LGPL is more aggressive about protecting the interests of the original project; by requiring intermediate distributors of works that include the original to make their changes available; but doesn't go much further than BSD in terms of watching over the end user. GPL explicitly demands that the end user's interest in access to the code be preserved, and the AGPL and GPL3 address the same interests in the context of 'cloud' and 'tivoized' scenarios.
However, across all of that, 'commercial/noncommercial' isn't an area of distinction. Obviously, these licenses have an effect on the viability of certain commercial schemes; but they have no explicit objectives in that area: If you can find a way to make money by selling software that is available in source form under the GPL3, rock on. If your freedom to add whatever proprietary features to FreeBSD can't save you from being crushed by generic upstream FreeBSD, sucks to be you.
By contrast, the whole idea of 'commercial' vs. 'noncommercial' reflects an explicit focus on matters that the software focused licenses leave implicit or simply consider an irrelevant detail to be worked out by what people can actually manage to succeed or fail at making money on. The closest analog, perhaps, is the bit in GPL compliance where it applies only if you distribute, not if you use internally. "Commercial/noncommercial" is a sort of much broader extension of that, positing that there is a 'noncommercial' area of culture-as-something-that-people-do that is separate from, and not merely a 'cottage industry' scaled version of the 'commercial' culture-as-something-that-media-industries-do, which is a monetary phenomenon and distinct both in degree and in kind from the noncommercial flavor.
In the context of software, I have to admit that I like the conceptual frameworks of the software-oriented licenses much better. This isn't to say that software cannot be a cultural thing; but most software is tools, complex tools, and it seems both appropriate and pragmatic to think about tools in terms of "How can we get good tools?" and "How can we ensure that our labor in producing tools ends up putting tools in the hands we want them to end up in?" OSS/FOSS licensing is a rather novel technique, born of the peculiar economics of software, for answering these questions; but it's actually a fairly conservative conceptual framework.
If anything, the 'Commercial'/'Noncommercial' framework is much more radical: The implicit assertion that there are areas of cultural output that are simply not amenable to resolution along the lines of market commerce(while certainly supportable, if Team Anthropologist fancies a trip back from the tribal regions to inform us that people who don't even have currency somehow manage to have music...); but it isn't necessarily something that would be a natural fit in ye olde contemporary consumer capitalist economies of the early 21st century... By contrast, CC-sharealike, CC-attribution, and similar are practically analogous to the software-oriented concepts, just written to cover non-software more cleanly, in that they don't posit this commercial/noncommercial distinction; but are more focused on either the GPL-style protection of the downstream user and the upstream developer, or the BSD style protection of attribution without significant interference in the distribution process.
Can't it be both?
Quantum beer — my favourite!
Open source cola has already been done too.
So basically he is doing what people have been doing for eons(sharing how to brew beer), but he has added the secret ingredient, pretentiousness and psuedo-intellectual drivel! Just what I always wanted with my suds.
Monstar L
I suspect it is also not your favorite beer.
I have been a homebrewer for 4+ years - and I have brewed with commercial brewers. I have taken commercially-produced wort (pre-beer) home and fermented it at home. I have gotten the "commercial" recipes for beers and replicated them on my homebrew equipment. All this I have done - and I can guarantee you that you will never replicate a beer. You could get close...but to say that "open source" beer gives you the same beer they produce is just not true. If you are going to make beer - there are tons of reasonable free places to get good recipes meant for homebrewers. "Pope" Jamil Zainasheff is a great resource to start with for simple, proven recipes.
The reason why you can't just replicate a beer is simple: *everything* matters. Variables that aren't related to a "recipe" include (from memory): water chemistry, mash temperature, mash duration, sparge temperature, sparge method, sparge rate, boiling rate, hopping method, cooling method, yeast pitching rate, fermentation temperature, fermentation length, fermentation vessel, filtering method, bottling/kegging conditioning method. Some of these are equipment dependent - but some are also *their* equipment dependent - and how they use their equipment as well!
The fact that Budweiser can come across as Budweiser from all of its production plants year after year is nothing short of a *very* involved and active brew-master. Despite its poor reputation in the beer community - they really are good at their job...of producing a yellow-ish, slightly malty, slightly hoppy, corn-flavored beer.