Spirit of community [LWN.net]

Spirit of community

Posted Jan 19, 2006 5:03 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322)
In reply to: Spirit of community by man_ls
Parent article: There Is No Open Source Community (O'ReillyNet)

Hey, I know which side my bread's buttered!

What I've *received* from the Free Software community is worth a million
times what I've actually *contributed*. I've spent a bare minimum, and
the reward has been huge. The same goes for most of the businesses that
have employed me over the years.

BTW I'm sure Abraham Lincoln said "Together we stand, divided we fall"
before Roger Waters did. And for all I know he wasn't the first.

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"together we stand, divided we fall" -- not Lincoln after all?

Posted Jan 19, 2006 5:34 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

...Or perhaps not. Wikiquote doesn't have it, but it does have a speech
referring to the United States as "a house divided against itself", after
the Gospels (eg. Mark 3:25: "And if a house be divided against itself,
that house cannot stand").

Certainly "together we stand, divided we fall" was a trade union rally
chant and a motto for African American community groups in the 1950s,
somewhat earlier than _The Wall_.

This just in from the infamous Google Book Search: The earliest
(mis-?)attribution to Lincoln I can find is from 1955, in "Price-support
Program: United States Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry".

Somehow I *doubt* that a US Senate committee report is the source of its
popularisation among the trade union movement :-)

"*United* we stand, divided we fall"

Posted Jan 19, 2006 5:59 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

The closest I can get to an 'origin' is either Aesop or "The Liberty
Song" (1768), written by John Dickinson (1732-1808), neither of which can
be considered to have coined the exact phrase (whether "United" or
"Together").

http://www.kdla.ky.gov/resources/kyseal.htm

Ah well.