A long time ago and far away, a Captain in the British Army retired from service and moved to an estate near Ballinrobe in Ireland. His name was Charles and he moved into Lough Mask House, a property owned by a wealthy landowner by the name of Lord Erne who was, by the way, the third Lord of Erne, and became an agent for Erne’s properties. Charles oversaw the Lord’s properties in County Mayo and collected rents. Lord Erne and other landlords of the time owned something like 99.8% of all the land and property in Ireland. The Irish were not entirely happy with this arrangement.
By all accounts, Charles, our retired captain, was a bit of a control freak and sought to enforce the ‘divine rights’ of the landowners, in particular those of Lord Erne, by increasingly strict rules, financial penalties for minor infractions, and forced evictions. Eventually, the good people of County Mayo went on strike and began a campaign to effectively ostracize Charles from the community in which he lived. James Redpath called it “social excommunication”. The captain’s full name, I should probably mention, was Charles Cunningham Boycott. It’s from him that we get the word, “boycott”.
Over the decades and into the 21st century, boycotts have become increasingly complex affairs but. As large corporations swallow up smaller companies who have themselves swallowed up others, the trail of who owns who becomes murkier all the time. You may decide to boycott one particular product, but that product may be owned by a company that is owned by a shell corporation that is itself owned by a numbered corporation in a foreign country.
Boycott, or the idea, has also entered the world of free software, in the sense that some have been trying to punish companies whose business practices don’t fall in line with a particular social ideology. A few years ago, there was a spate of articles regarding the creators of particular open source packages fighting against companies that used that specific package; it had to do There are no easy answers and plenty of questions. Perhaps the first to ask is, “Is it time to rethink what ‘free’ means?” Feel free to weigh in with your comments.
