Commons
December 18th, 2002 by HenEver noticed the word ‘Commons’ leaking into lots of open source things? Apache Commons, the new Creative Commons license…
Being English, it makes me think of English history a lot. The agricultural revolution, the House of Commons, the local commons and lots of other pre-socialist ideas. I wonder if there are links?
From what little I remember of history, land used to be shared between the people in a village. They could go and keep chickens on it, run their children, plant herbs and vegetables. Common land. As the government grew more economically domineering, they reclaimed this land, or maybe it was just rich people buying it. Anyway, it was involved in the reactions to the increased agricultural efficiency that had arrived through improved ploughs and things. There were lots of revolts in which people from the south east of england marched on London [Wat Tyler being the one that always sticks in memory].
Common land still exists, with the usual humour of age-old law.
Now we have such bombastic terms as ‘Revolution’ being applied to open source coding. Less loudly, the word Commons is cropping up. I wonder if there are analogies that can be applied and if ‘Commons’ is the word they really ought to fear. MS tried to link open source to communism, which is just a McCarthy-ism bit of politics, but I think it definitely shares roots in the original beliefs of the Commons.
[Incidentally, I found a nice site with lots of old documents on: Avalon project. Avalon… Commons… Now we just need Henry II signing a peace accord in Jakarta over the Turbine war.]