Free Beer

I kind of intended not to blog about beer on this site, but here's to...

Mulling over the concept of open-source software, which is part of what I have to do in real life (real life, by the way, has kept me from posting for over a week), I came across a Wikipedia entry and later the official blog for open-source beer. What a treat!

I'm still new to this concept, but it looks like some college students in Denmark were experiementing with ways to expand the open-source ideolology and came up with the idea of brewing a batch of beer and then sharing the recipe so that the rest of the world could offer improvements. So the beer's free, not as in "on the house," but free of regular concepts of property and ownership. As a beer lover and homebrewer (and occasional information science grad student), the whole idea of this thing piques my interest in so many ways.

Given my experience knockin' 'em back and talking shop with professional brewers and homebrew hobbyists, I'm struck that maybe the beer industry is the perfect model for the open-source software people to look at and follow in their own pursuits. I'll be getting caught up on the history of Free Beer over the next few days and hope to post more later. Maybe when I get around to brewing again, I'll brew some Free Beer.

More later.