Wikipedia
OpenCola is a brand of open-source cola, where the instructions for making it are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe.
The original version 1.0 was released on 27 January 2001 . Current version is 1.1.3. Although originally intended as a promotional tool to explain free and open source software, the drink took on a life of its own and 150,000 cans were sold. The Toronto-based company Opencola founded by Grad Conn, Cory Doctorow, and John Henson became better known for the drink than the software it was supposed to promote. Laird Brown, the company's senior strategist, attributes its success to a widespread mistrust of big corporations and the "proprietary nature of almost everything."
Opencola was a Toronto-based software company founded in 1999 by Grad Conn, Cory Doctorow and John Henson to create "collaboration object lookup architecture" software, and sold in 2003. The software and specifications produced were all released as open source. The earliest archived page of the company website described "OpenCOLA" as an application, a protocol, suite of tools, and the company itself.
The Opencola desktop client/server (or "clerver" in Opencola's parlance) application enabled users to collaboratively search, acquire, manage and share information from multiple data sources, including the Internet, peers on the Opencola network, and existing proprietary databases, from a single interface. Opencola extended search engine capabilities with the ability to perform contextual searching – a process that searches the entire contextual subject matter of a document for relevance and tries to replenish previous searches with more relevant results. Searches would propagate throughout the network as needed to locate the specified content.
The company funded further development of and released Justin Chapweske's Swarmcast, then released it as GPL software May 18, 2001. The software used peer-to-peer swarming techniques similar to Bittorrent to accelerate distribution of large high-volume (frequently accessed) content, as a way to reduce load on source servers, with emphasis on content streaming. The company's Folders project used Swarmcast technology to accelerate content distribution within organizations.
In summer 2003, the company was sold to Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario.
OpenCola or Opencola may refer to:
- OpenCola (drink), a brand of cola with an openly available recipe
- Opencola (company), Canadian software company