Our lives today run on software, much of it "open source." The combination of the software and the stewardship process by which it is produced create "digital commons." This is a type of collectively managed resource that is difficult to constrain in access or usage due to some inherent properties. However, it is still possible for actors to enclose some of the commons production process and, as a result, influence the output.

Over the past 30+ years, Linux has grown to be called “largest collaborative development project in the history of computing.” The result is a complex software artifact, the Kernel, and a wide diversity of extensions to the kernel: Distros. While some are community run, some are commercial operations. This profit incentive sometimes lead to strange entanglements of the commercial entities and the commons which they build on. This process of knowledge extraction for influence and profit is called "enclosure."

While Ethereum is ~25 years younger, we can already see parallels between the two projects: commons-stewarded software and state extended by a burgeoning ecosystem of entities building novel mechanisms.

Can we avoid some of the enclosure found in Linux? I make the case that extraction occurs as state production is commodified. To hedge against this happening too early, we should be clear-eyed about the encumbering stewardship process: who and what can participate, what the stewardship process looks like, and how it is funded.

Protocol Guild is a commons-funding mechanism tailored to Ethereum protocol development. Over 150 individual peers collectively produce a weighted list of core protocol contributors, which enables the broader ecosystem to fund their work directly outside of encumbering commercial entities.

• there is a typo in the title of the first slide (Commodifiying → Commodifying)
• there is an error in the second slide (15 → 25)

<tags>Ethereum</tags>