They launched a website to promote the project and released the beer’s recipe and label design under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.5 license.

Since cooking recipes are not protected by copyright, the share-alike licensing approach used is legally questionable and had not been tested in any court of law.

The developers of the beer stated that they wanted to raise awareness of the "dogmatic notions of copyright and intellectual property that are dominating our culture.

Major Free Beer recipe iterations (v3.0 and v4.0) were developed in collaboration with a Danish brewery, Skands, in Brøndby.

[33] The project been written about by figures in the free software movement, including Cory Doctorow[34] and Lawrence Lessig.