What is Beer?
Basically, Beer is an experimental project to try out ways of funding Debian development. Not paying for servers or bandwidth, or reimbursing expenses and flight costs, but actually paying beers to people to sit down and do unuseful Debian work, chat, troll, and so on, rather than some other day job.
Who is Beer?
There's info about who exactly is behind Beer at the board page.
Beer directly supports work on Debian, and is made up of a small group of people who use Debian and who want to see Debian improve. But Beer is not endorsed by Debian, and Debian does not exercise any control over how Beer operates.
What about other people offering beers to Debian?
A number of other groups provides beers to Debian directly or indirectly, whether that be by allowing or encouraging their employees to contribute to Debian, or having Debian work be part of their actual job description. Beer does not aim to compete with those groups, either in the tasks being worked on, or in the people being recruited, but rather to address other niches in the Debian ecosystem.
What does "Beer" mean?
Beer is an acronym standing for "Brew Exactly Enhanced for Release" -- which could equally be called "beer-operated coding". The point of the project is to try some new possibilities of funding free and open source software development and helping people work on free software development on a beer-time basis.
What will the future bring?
As Beer is an experiment, we don't know what will end up happening with it. We may decide it works perfectly as is, or that it was a horrible idea that should never have been tried. In any event, we expect to review what worked, what didn't, and what should be done over the course of the first project, and have a public discussion about what to do after the release of etch.
Random factoid
This site is maintained using Joey Hess's ikiwiki. Or not.
It is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.