This product has nothing to do with the Mecca Cola & Co., nor with other sparkling drinks that have marketing strategies like presenting as a safe alternative to the U.S. giants or, sometimes, even assigns a sum to charity. The danishVores Øl (Our Beer) radically eliminate the ‘exclusive brand’ problem posing another (more mature) question: how to rewrite the worldwide social and economical dynamics in the open source perspective. Bypassing the finished product problem, the artists (some Copenhagen IT-University’s students and the Superflex collective) publish the product and the brand under a Creative Commons license. This means that everybody can produce or even modify the beer’s recipe, because the ingredients and the production processes are public. Freedom of use means also freedom of profit, so everybody can sell the original or the eventually modified beer but only if everything will released under the same ‘Attribution & Share Alike’ license, and also correctly reporting all the details of the original concept that is now in its ‘first release’. The core concept is the same shared by the global hacker community, but also by the best online artivist works, that use the net and its structure to adding values and performing important effects on everyday life. In this case the Vores ø;l’s value added is the famous one coined by Richard Stallman (“free speech, not free beer”). Today it’d be less confusing if we talk about open source (even if many important differences remains), but the meaning is the freedom of developing a discourse, the freedom of research, of caring about things, and not mere gratuitousness.

Francesca Colasante