The first version of OpenCola, 1.0, came out on 27 January 2001. The latest version of OpenCola is 1.1.3. At first, the company wanted to use OpenCola to promote the company to explain free and open source software, but they became better known for the drink than the software they wanted to promote, and 150,000 cans of OpenCola were sold. Laird Brown, the company's senior strategist, says OpenCola was a success due to many people not trusting big corporations and the "proprietary nature of almost everything".