Tocqueville on open source development

[Case Roole <cjr@xs4all.nl>]

A bit farfetched perhaps, but I am regularly pained by writers who insist
on comparing open source development with communism.

While being disappointed in ESR on the Halloween writings Jerry Pournelle
dropped a hint to which I have found the most appropriate reference.
It seems to me that open source development is the result of a long-time
all-American tradition:

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Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Whenever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

I met with several kinds of associations in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeeded in proposing a common object for the exertions of a great many men and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it.

Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America", IInd book, chapter V

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-cjr
http://billwatch.net/ (which is down for the weekend)