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Milon Gupta Eurescom gupta@eurescom.de

Open Source has become a powerful concept in the software domain. Some people believe that it could also work in the world of traditional products. Danish students have now applied the Open-Source concept to beer brewing.

A group of students at the IT University in Copenhagen have created a beer called Vores Øl, which means Our Beer. Version 1.0 of this open source beverage is a medium strong ale-type beer with 6 percent alcohol and a golden-red colour. It gets a special taste from the addition of guarana beans. With this caffeine-like ingredient, the students want to counter the drowsiness-inducing effects of the alcohol.

The recipe and brand of Vores Øl is published under a Creative Commons license, which means anyone can use the recipe for pleasure or profit. Only if you make money with their recipe, you have to give them credit and publish any changes you make to the brewing formula.

Open Source experiment

The Vores Øl Group, as the students call themselves, created Our Beer in collaboration with art organisation Superflex “as an experiment in applying modern open source ideas and methods on a traditional real-world product”, according to their website.

Why they have chosen beer? There are two main reasons: first, they like beer, and second, they felt inspired by a legendary quote from the GNU definition of free software: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech’, not as in ‘free beer’. "Beer was chosen for its universal qualities as a commodity that we would like to think of as free," said Rasmus Nielsen from Superflex.

The students hope that their beer will improve through Open Source “and perhaps one day becomes the Linux of beers”, as they say on their website. According to Open Source rules, even Carlsberg, the Microsoft of Danish beer, could use the Vores Øl recipe.

So far, the Danish students have already received international acclaim through guestbook entries on their website from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Apart from general praise, the guestbook contains constructive suggestions like the one from Laurence, UK, who suggested a non-alcoholic version. Diego from Italy would like to be contacted as soon as there is an Open Source ice cream.

Cola and cars

The Danish students are not the first to apply Open Source to real-world products. A mathematician from Venezuela has created a formula for a soft drink called Open Cola.

If challenging the mighty soft drink giant Coca Cola is bold, the efforts of British engineer Hugo Spowers appear even more enterprising. About two years ago, he started the OSCar project for an Open Source car. With this he wanted to push a fuel-cell car as an alternative to today’s gasoline- driven cars. Based on the Open Source dictum that “Given enough eyeballs, any bug is shallow”, Mr Spowers believed that distributed car design via the “bazaar” model would be much more efficient than the centralised design done by giants like Ford and General Motors. So far, the world is still waiting for proof, and OSCar seems to have gone at least to hibernation, if not worse.

Open biotechnology

Going beyond the world of consumer goods, Open Source has also been applied to biotechnology. The Australian non-profit research organisation Cambia has created the BiOS initiative, which stands for Biological Innovation for Open Society. BIOS wants to counter the private appropriation of critical enabling technologies through intellectual property rights, typically patents in the field of biological innovation. The initiative wants to foster democratic innovation in the application of biological technologies.

Brewtopia

Open Source is not limited to physical and intellectual products, it can also be applied to companies. This leads us back to Australia and to beer. In the Sydney area, ex-Red Hat employee Liam Mulhall founded the Open Source brewery Brewtopia. The business model allows anyone interested to own part of the brewery and influence decisions concerning its beer brand Blowfly. Brewtopia’s grass-root-democratic claim: “The only beer company built by the people for the people”.

Blowfly has become particularly popular with employees from IT companies like Cisco, Mitel and Alcatel, who have consumed the beer enthusiastically at their company parties. Brewtopia even supplied the beer at Yahoo's 10th anniversary party.

It seems that the Open Source concept’s entry into the real world has so far been most successful in the brewing sector. Which proves that there is no better beer than free beer.

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