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  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

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I have been aware of Free Beer for years, but I have never come across it on my physical adventures, so unfortunately I have never had a chance to taste it. On the other hand, I’ve often attended cocktails and other occasions where I’ve had the chance to sip some non-free beer freely. An entry in the Free Beer blog (which in turn references an entry in Lessig’s blog) got me thinking about the free speech vs. free beer dichotomy again.

We can chuckle at the idea, as I certainly have, of Free Beer that is “free as in free speech” but not “free as in free beer”. But it is one of the best pedagogic instruments we have.

Free Beer is now at version 4.0, and everyone is invited to brew some, improve the recipe, and share their improvements with the community of beer lovers all around the world. Anyone is also free to brew Free Beer in their commercial brewery and sell it on the market as a commodity, essentially asking their customers to think not about “free beer” but “free speech”. The open source recipe is constantly improving because of the effort put in by the distributed, volunteer beer hackers, as well as because of competition between the commercial brewers in the market. I think this is easier to explain than Red Hat.

Beautiful. We have won.

Today, the Finnish Linux User Group[1] announced their yearly Linux Contributor Award. The Winner: Ubuntu Suomi! Translating from the press release (Finnish PDF).

The volunteer community has taken care of translations, arranged events around the country, promoted Linux and Free Software to legislators and, above all, provided user support through its web forum.

Mirv accepting the prize.
(Photo from the ubuntu-fi blog)

Congratulations to our most excellent LoCo Team!

Two honorable mentions were awarded as well. One was given to the Linux.fi wiki. The choice further emphasizes the great importance that peer-provided support and documentation has for the success of Free Software. The other one went to Monty Widenius, the founder of MySQL. Yes, in case you didn’t know, he is yet another Finn helping build the tools for our road to software freedom. :) Altough MySQL is not directly related to LInux, as one of the pillars of the near-ubiqutuous LAMP stack, its success is very much tied to that of Linux.

Cheers to these Honored Ones too!

[1] Yes, there is only one. It is a small country :)

This morning, I found an email from Karol in my inbox, telling me about a promotional Ubuntu website he designed. It is slick!

The site is a place for Ubuntu users to share their story. Why do you use Ubuntu? Tell your story about security, stability, desktop sexiness and all the other reasons to choose our favorite Linux distribution for your daily business and pleasure use!