A Toast to Dissent

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Two microbreweries in Montreal and Vancouver are making the 'uncorporate' beer, and about a dozen bars and caf?s are selling it. The profits are split with berculture, which produces political documentaries and film festivals, and campaigns against corporate giants like Wal-Mart. Like open-source software code, the ale's recipe is free for anyone to use and modify, so long as users in turn share any changes.

?berbr isn't the world's only open-source beer, nor is it the first. That title is claimed by Vores ?l (Our Beer), a meaty brew with a caffeine boost from South American guarana beans. The beer was created last year by a group of students at Copenhagen's IT University in a workshop on copyright and intellectual property taught by artist Rasmus Nielsen. The project applies the logic behind open-source software, which flouts Microsoft's corporate hegemony by tapping the creativity of the masses to design ever-evolving programs like the Linux operating system. 'Why not take the legal framework, the open-source licenses, and apply them to analog products?' Nielsen asked in a Wired News report (July 18, 2005).

Advocates of open-source software, also known as 'free software,' have long used the analogy 'free as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer' ' to illustrate the difference between liberty and price. A truly free beer, Nielsen and his students thought, might drive the movement's point home. 'You're free to change it,' Nielsen told the BBC (July 28, 2005). 'But if you use our recipe as the basis for your beer, you have to be open with your recipe as well.'

'In an industry where commercial brewers guard their secret recipes as tightly as Microsoft guards its proprietary software code, these student activists hope that Vores ?l 'becomes the Linux of beers.'

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