According to Wikipedia, Cory Doctorow of boing boing fame was one of OpenCola’s creators.
OpenCola – Open Source Coca Cola
If you’ve been to a computer show in recent months you might have seen it: a shiny silver drink can with a ring-pull logo and the words “opencola” on the side. Inside is a fizzy drink that tastes very much like Coca-Cola. Or is it Pepsi?There’s something else written on the can, though, which sets the drink apart. It says “check out the source at opencola.com.” Go to that Web address and you’ll see something that’s not available on Coca-Cola’s website, or Pepsi’s — the recipe for cola. For the first time ever, you can make the real thing in your own home.
OpenCola is a brand of cola unique in that the instructions for making it are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, license their recipe under the GNU General Public License.
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Sadly, the company is now dead. But since the recipe and the instructions are open source, they are available to anyone who wants to whip up a batch.
And if cola isn’t your thing and want something stronger, have a FreeBeer.
Faced with frequent puzzlement over how “free software” could be free if it cost money (and is able to support billion-dollar investments from the likes of IBM, in the case of Linux), Stallman came up with a simple explanation: “think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not ‘free beer.'”
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So along came a bunch of Danes who seem to have missed the meeting that made clear this was just a metaphor. “Free as in free software,” they explained when rolling out Free Beer, or, as their website now says, “Free as in free speech.”
That’s why I come here John! You guys do great work!
I dont get it. Commercial Cola is already very near free. Beer from the supermarket is the same way. I would probably cost more for you to make your own Cola or Beer, than it costs to simply buy a can.
Commercial software seems to have the same economic processes occuring.
Cory Doctorow has written a few good pieces of science fiction. His extreme science fiction anthology is even better, one of the best books Ive read in a while. However his cultural criticism articles lead me to think… He should stick to fiction.
Something about… When someone tells me that I must check out second life, then I do check out second life… All the credibility just evaporates away…
Cory, you should have gotten a windows computer, we have better games.
It’s not the cost, it’s the idea. I can’t wait to try this.