A story on newsforge is telling of a UK company that is starting a new service buymeabeer.com. The purpose? Ever get done with a tech support call and have the customer be so happy they say, "I would buy you a beer if I were there." No need to let distance be a factor with this idea.

Could this be the end of the "Free As in Beer" remarks?

So, after reading the story here on slashdot, I had to try it. I'm impressed but I came to a slight realization. This thing is sorta like Fedora Core for Debian. Now perhaps I've been using FC for a bit too long, but it seems like Ubuntu is really the "bleeding edge" of Debian. And according to the docs on Ubuntu's website, the developers will be committing patches and such to Ubuntu software directly to the Debian tree. I just can't get over it, it sounds a lot like the FC/RHEL relationship. Except that Debian is free and RHEL is not.