Beer goes open source and Free ! Marketing 2.0 is here

A short clip from the 2006 Creative Commons iSummit in Rio de Janeiro. Watch Minister of Culture and musical legend Gilberto Gil toast to Creative Commons with the specially brewed, Danish "Free Beer." Some Rights Reserved. Available under the Creative Commons Attribution License (Brazil) 2.5.

We discussed here about the open source in software as a new economics driving force in Information Technology industry, how giving away its product and services could lead to the best European profitability for Airlines - see Free is good for our business Mr CEO. Well, what would you say about beer going open source and free? Yes you read beer, like in a pub, watching a world cup final - ooops not the final, not the final, I'm French.
"Danish Vores Øl (‘Our Beer’) claims to be the world's first open-source beer. The recipe and the entire brand is published under a Creative Commons license, meaning that anyone can use Vores Øl's recipe to brew the beer or to create a derivative. As long as home brewers publish the recipe under the same license, they’re free to make money from their efforts, which includes free access to Vores Øl’s design and branding elements." reports TrendWatching.
As the recipe embed Guarana, a fruit used in Brazil for very popular soft drinks, Gilberto Gil was caught up in a video - now distributed through YouTube, a fast growing Web 2.0 brand all about video sharing - tasting it and promoting it probably without knowing it. Isn't it an interesting gimmick of viral marketing? The story does not tell if Gilberto Gil asked for a compensation out of it, nor complained about his brand image being exploited beyond his control. Welcome to the world of Marketing 2.0!

Fellow marketers, do you have such a marketing tactic in your next campaign ? Is creative thinking part of your Web 2.0 arsenal ? Are you able to share through open source the very core of your craft to generate volume adoption of it, driving to more business opportunities ? Will you consider "Free" as one of the element of your next media planning ? These are questions that we'd never asked even 2 years ago.

The Free Beer story is true and real, but originated from a group of students at the IT-University in Copenhagen. They created "Our Beer" in collaboration with Superflex as an experiment in applying modern open source ideas and methods on a traditional real-world product (beer).
When is the coming real corporation experience going to happen ? Or did it already happen ?

Well done "Our Beer" fellows !