The Argument Against Non-FOSB

Today I had one of my geekiest conversations online with someone from work. It all started with me sending him a link to an OSCON review where the author said:

“The day ended with the Mozilla party off-site. The band was good, but the free (as in “free beer” and “freedom”) beer was awful. Someone should fork the beer and make it better.”

Well that kind of sparked this random conversation:

tom: hahahaha

tom: LOL

tom: then there would be a bunch of forks and the base beer would become watered down

stefan: yeah, and several of the forked beers would stop being actively developed on, and would eventually get exploited causing mass food poisoning

tom: then Linus would take the side of one of the more obscure beers and it would enter the mainstream trunk

stefan: hahaha yeah! Eventually a smooth, easy to drink beer would hit the market, with an african name meaning “Goes down Easy”. It would start gaining popularity due to it’s over simplicity to pour into a glass or mug.

tom: LOL!

tom: but there will be the “hacker” beers with names like Deviant that have a huge amount of drinkers loyal to it

tom: and fring beers that come on strong then after a few years the taste changes becuase the hops and barley
maintaners give up, and people start drinking the African one

stefan: Anheuser Bush, not wanting to miss out on the action, starts selling hangover cure vouchers to one of the fledging OS beer companies.

tom: Molson takes them to court saying they are inrfinging on their brewing patents

tom: then fails to tell them which ones

stefan: The talk in the OSB community is that Molson is full of it, and that you cannot patent simple hops and barleys

tom: ….but the average beer drinker continues to drink it molson becuase its the dominant brand on the market, even though it sucks and makes your bladder crash on an hourly basis

stefan: A once fringe beer, is now starting to make waves as well in the beer market. Building on top of the OSB recipe, they release iBeer with a strong marketing campaign of silhouettes of people drinking beer to trendy indie music.

tom: Molson then tries to revamp its product to compete by adding trasparent labels and eye-candy, but it takes 5-years of developemnt and the product inside still blows

tom: hahahah….”Hi, I’m a Molson Canadian”

tom: “And I’m an iBeer”

stefan: “Whats the matter Molson Canadian?” “I am just sooo bloated. My maker things it is ok to fill me up with preservatives, and other bad things that just make me so very unpure”

tom: “Oh see iBeer doesn’t have that problem. I just taste good right out of the box”

stefan: hahaha oh this is so awesome… I should blog this conversation

tom: I was thinking the exact same thing