The Digital Commons: What Open Source and the Handloom Weavers Have in Common

The Common And The Goose

They hang the Man who steals the Goose from the Common, but Knight the Man who steals the Common from the Goose!

That anonymous 18th century verse — sharp, bitter and entirely unresolved — captures something about power and property that most history lessons quietly skip over. It also turns out to be a remarkably accurate description of what's happening right now in the world of technology. But to understand why, we need to go back a few centuries first.

Before the Fences Went Up

There's a tendency to think of pre-industrial England as uniformly grim — peasants scratching a miserable existence from exhausted soil. The reality was considerably more complicated, and considerably more interesting.

Before the Enclosure Acts transformed the English countryside, ordinary working people had genuine access to the commons. These weren't wastelands — they were productive, shared resources. Common land provided pasture for livestock, wood for fuel, and supplementary income that gave working families a meaningful degree of economic independence.

This independence was reflected in skilled trades too. The handloom weavers of Lancashire and Yorkshire — familiar territory for those of us in the North West — weren't wage slaves. They were skilled craftspeople who owned their means of production, set their own hours, and negotiated the terms of their own labour. Cottage industry wasn't perfect, but it offered something the factory system would systematically destroy: autonomy.

The Enclosure Acts changed everything. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, common land was progressively fenced off, privatised, and absorbed into large estates. The justification was efficiency — the commons, it was argued, were poorly managed and unproductive. The reality was dispossession on a massive scale. Rural communities lost the supplementary resources that had underpinned their independence. The handloom weavers found their livelihoods undercut by mechanisation they had no stake in.

This wasn't accidental. The Enclosure Acts, combined with the harsh provisions of the Poor Laws, functioned together as a mechanism to drive displaced rural workers into the new urban factories and mills. The mills needed labour. Labour needed to eat. Enclosure made sure there was no alternative. The commons didn't disappear because they were inefficient — they disappeared because independent people are harder to exploit than desperate ones.

The Digital Commons

Fast forward two and a half centuries, and the parallel is striking.

Open source software functions as a digital commons. Linux, which powers the majority of the world's servers, smartphones and cloud infrastructure, was built collaboratively — contributed to freely, improved collectively, owned by no one and available to everyone. Wikipedia is a shared knowledge commons maintained by volunteers. The internet protocols that make all of this possible were developed openly, for the common good.

Like the pre-enclosure commons, these resources are genuinely productive. The digital economy runs on open source. The irony — and it is a rich one — is that many of the companies most aggressively pursuing digital enclosure are themselves built entirely on open source foundations. Android is Linux. The cloud infrastructure of Amazon, Google and Microsoft runs predominantly on Linux and open source tooling. They took from the commons, built fortunes on it, and are now erecting fences.

The Birth of a Movement

The story of open source as a conscious movement begins in 1983, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project with a simple but radical proposition: software should be free. Not free as in free beer — free as in freedom. Free to use, to study, to modify, and to share. Stallman's four freedoms weren't just a licensing philosophy; they were a direct challenge to the enclosure logic being applied to code.

In 1991, a Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel. Combined with the GNU tools Stallman's project had produced, it formed a complete, free operating system. Torvalds famously described Stallman as "the God of free software" — adding, with characteristic directness, "but I'm the engineer."

What followed was remarkable. A collaborative, decentralised project produced software that now dominates the world's infrastructure. Linux runs on more than 96% of the world's top web servers. It powers the International Space Station. It is, by any measure, one of the most successful software projects in history — built without a corporate owner, driven by a global community of contributors.

The New Enclosures

And yet the fences are going up.

GitHub, the platform that hosts the majority of the world's open source code — including the Linux kernel itself — was acquired by Microsoft in 2018. The commons is now managed by a landlord with commercial interests. That may not matter today. It may matter enormously tomorrow.

Corporate "open washing" is endemic — companies that market their products as open source while quietly retaining control of the features, data and infrastructure that actually matter. The term Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) exists precisely because "open source" alone has become an insufficiently strong guarantee.

Patents and digital rights management lock down code and data in ways that would be instantly recognisable to anyone who'd studied the Enclosure Acts. AI model weights — the accumulated product of training on vast quantities of collectively produced human knowledge — are kept proprietary by the companies that process them, despite being built on a commons none of those companies created.

Platform feudalism is perhaps the most insidious form. The commons exists, but the infrastructure it runs on is privately owned, and the rules can change. GitHub could change its terms tomorrow. App stores already function as gatekeepers, extracting rent from every transaction and deciding unilaterally what software users are permitted to run on their own devices.

The Resistance

The Free Software Movement, copyleft licensing (most notably the GNU General Public Licence), and the growing decentralised web — Mastodon, PeerTube, Codeberg — represent the modern equivalent of the Diggers and the commoners who resisted enclosure. They are asserting that shared resources should remain shared, that the digital commons belongs to everyone who contributes to it, and that the fences being erected serve the interests of shareholders, not users.

The question the enclosure poem poses is as live now as it was in the 18th century: who controls the commons, who benefits from it, and who decides when the fences go up?

Open source, at its best, is an answer to that question. The challenge is making sure it stays one.

In our next post, we'll look at what this means in practice — the real cost of proprietary software, and what the path to digital independence actually looks like for individuals and organisations alike.