freespirit

Last year I was invited to speak at the FSCONS conference in Göteborg, Sweden. FSCONS describes itself as "a meeting place for social change, focused on the future of free software and free society" and brings together many interesting speakers involved in Free Software, Free Culture and beyond.

After the conference, a number of the people who had given talks at the conference decided that if each of us wrote a text somehow related to what we had given a talk about, there might just be enough interesting material to self-publish a book with this material. The form of the text was left up to each speaker, it just had to somehow relate to the talk without just repeating what was already presented at the conference.

I pretty quickly wrote a short essay based on the idea that the same kind of creativity that made me spend my childhood building fantastic projects with Lego bricks, is what motivates me and many others to participate in the development of Free/Open source Software, and many other similar activities and that the role of consumer is not a natural fit for many people. I called it "From Consumer to Creator - The Lego Generation in the Digital Age"

Then nothing happened for a long time and I sort of forgot about the whole thing...

And then in a mad dash of activity to get the project finished before this years FSCONS conference, all of a sudden the editing was completed and version 1.0 of "Free Beer" was published. (The name makes sense when you look at some of the contents). My essay made it in as the very first chapter, and serves quite well as an opener in my own humble only-ever-so-sightly-totally-biased opinion

The book homepage is at freebeer.fscons.org Here is also the bug-tracker so that when enough bugs have been squashed we can release version 1.1. The book can be downloaded freely as a PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence, version 2.5. It is also possible to buy a hard-copy.

Thanks to all the other people who wrote a piece for the book, and especially to Stian Rødven Eide for editing, getting all the practical stuff done and not least, keeping the project alive.

Also, thanks to Amaroks very own Lydia Pintscher for reading through my early versions of the essay and giving feedback.