Protocol Berg: Trent van Epps - Linux & Ethereum: Commoning vs Commodifying

hi everyone um yes so let's get into it yeah I'm Trent uh van apps I am a member of the protocol Guild and I work at the ethereum foundation as well um however anything I say here is my personal opinion and doesn't represent the wonderful people at either of these uh organizations um if you don't know protocol Guild is a collective of 50 core contributors to ethereum uh it's a mechanism for distributed funding um I'm going to talk a bit about that at the beginning and the end uh as you can see the title is different so I apologize if you feel um a bit rugged here but this is a slightly different talk from what I originally submitted uh but still like a higher level view of what protocol is protocol Guild is and what it hopes to accomplish but just from a broader perspective so um yeah we'll get into it thank you to the organized ERS as always fronie and everybody else who's been involved in the volunteers for putting on what's already an amazing event so yeah we'll get into it so uh big claims that we're going to get into I think that we should keep in mind the concept of the comment if you're not aware of it um we'll get into it and describe it and see how it it's relevant to ethereum um I also think it's relevant to look at Linux and that's what this talk is about looking at their 15year head start in devel Ving an open source ecosystem how Corporate entities get involved and um how they interact with the the production of software um this is a little more wordy but uh one of my claims is that entities which commoditize state production so taking software and doing things with it they have the greatest capacity and the greatest incentive to actually uh enclose the commons and then finally the commons infrastructure should be funded as close to the source as possible um and like I said that's protocol guil and we we'll get into that a little bit later so here's the overview of the summarized version of what all that is and what we're going to talk about what are the commons uh get into Linux and ethereum how they are commons and how they are enclosed and then finally protocol Guild uh this talk is really heavily inspired by a book called incorporating the commons uh by a um an author named Benjamin burkenbine recommend you check it out it's really excellent overview of Linux and its relationship to corporate entities and and how they um contribute to and extract from The Commons so uh definitely recommend checking it out if you're curious about these things I'm talking about so let's start with a really high level definition what are commons historically these um described physical resources that are shared or collectively managed um forests Fisheries pastures uh really long history around the world these are were prevalent uh especially throughout the medieval this is what a lot of people think of medieval Commons where you have people sharing pasture with sheep and you know they're doing sustenance farming um but over the last 20 or so years this has been brought into digital Commons um to include things like scientific knowledge public data sets uh Wikipedia for example as like a body of knowledge that people contribute to and and people gain benefits from uh using um as well as software like Linux and ethereum and there are some important differences between physical and digital comp that uh can be described in this this 2x two and the the two parameters or the two characteristics that you can compare them against are excludability so can I prevent other people from using this resource and rivalry uh once it's once I consume it does that prevent somebody else from consuming it or using it um and so what we're interested in is the bottom right side of this 2x two which is knowledge Commons code uh free software like I said Linux and ethereum and um we'll get into why digital Commons have these unique properties and and what makes them a little bit special so I've developed this framework hopefully it's accurate if there are any uh people who are more well versed in the Commons uh literature or research please do come correct me afterwards because I'm uh yeah limited experience but this is sort of what I've came up with of how Commons are manifested so at their core they're always composed of individuals you don't have ai agents at least yet um maybe they'll be individuals someday but it's individuals bringing their own context their own experiences um their own preferences um you know their uh lived experience they're bringing that alongside their labor and um their work into uh the second bit of the diagram which is they're bringing all of these things into Frameworks of production and this isn't just like um I do this work you do that work it's the social relationships it's the political arrangements to how the commons the output of the commons is governed um uh it there can be economic incentives there's a whole bunch of different things that you can use to structure and govern how the the the commons is produced and this is an important uh uh part of that or it's an important thing that um contributors get when they are helping to produce the commons it's it's not just the output it's also the rights and obligations that they're constrained by as uh a result of participating in this this framework and so at the end like I said there's the commment there's this this output so um Linux andum there's this body of software that people can use um and it's like I said structured by the relationships and the labor of the people who are actually doing the work uh another important concept that we'll we'll touch on is enclosure so enclosure is the process of appropriation by private interests and historically uh like I said the medieval um image of Commons where you had your local Lord would show up and he could capriciously say um you know actually I want to use this field for my own use or and you know it happened in a bunch of different ways over over time or in historically um through a bunch of different formal or informal methods um but because it's a physical Commons it's a physical good it could be uh taken by by threat of force or through other methods like that diagram shows just somebody shows up disregards the social media means of production or the social relationships that Manifest this shared resource and they can just take it um like I said physical and digital Commons they have different attributes and one of the things about digital Commons is they can't be they can't be claimed in the same way that um physical Commons can be fully appropriated um Benjamin the author I mentioned earlier calls this incorporation where you have corporate entities sort of inserting themselves into the common production process um but in in crypto and ethereum we we are familiar with the terms of capture or coercion co-option of the production process so it's these entities inserting themselves into the production of the commons and trying to influence for example how the ethereum protocol is uh constructed or or made to their benefit so these are the two questions we'll get into next what are the unique characteristics that digital comments like Linux and ethereum have and how do they get enclosed or appropriated um so very brief intro to Linux um it started in the 9s by lonus as a student um and today it's been called the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing as well as a cancer by a former Microsoft CEO does anybody know who the CEO was let's do some participation does anybody know the name Steve Balmer yes whoever you win something um but yeah Steve Balmer he said this and he's pretty famous Microsoft has had this this hater Arc which they've they've changed over the years maybe they still have this core of hate but um they really didn't like Linux uh when it was originally coming out um and this uh this diagram here is super pixelated but it's it just demonstrates over the the the past many years how it's blossomed into this incredible array of uh different distributions different versions of software fit for different use cases and it's it's uh pointed to often as a success story for uh how open source software can be constructed and and used on a large scale so going through the same framework you have open source devs that come they're interested in contributing to this product uh or this Commons software um and they do this through floss Norms so free Libre open- Source software is what that stands for um you know they're collaborating with each other they're helping each other review PRS that's there's a whole um cultural norm that goes into um collaborating on software like this there's also the benevolent dictator for Life social dynamics so lonus is has a lot of sway in the community he's um a very present voice and people trust his opinion so there's this social Dynamic of uh people trust what he has to say and what he believes the software should do in the future uh as well as things like uh the GPL license this is an important legal structure that cons strains how people can interact with uh the things that are coming out of the Comm so all of these things and probably some others which I haven't listed are really important for structuring the relationships of people as they contribute to the commons and um as you may have guessed this produces the Linux kernel and so this is the the core component of what people start to build on uh but it's it's just software right it's not something that people can actually use to a large degree and what we're interested in is uh the extended Commons that that fourth diagram there um where the software becomes state where it becomes somebody using it on their computer um so we're going to go through how it goes from the kernel to the extended Commons and then enclosure from there so in this Fifth Fifth diagram you have people setting up overlapping relationships to the kernel um similar to what we saw in the the previous slide um some of the other ones uh you'll see the the smaller Dash circles there nonprofits maybe they're still engaged in their production of the kernel uh the Linux foundation for example supports some developers but they're not actually engaged in the production of State or the software that people actually end up using uh so we have these groups of people that get together they have an interest in extending the kernel for a particular use case or a particular Niche they gather together and they produced these bits of software they're called dros um they uh like like I said are usually tailored for a specific Niche or a specific function and people decide to use which one suits their fancy or has a specific feature that they're interested in using uh and the black dots in that six diagram are the users these are people who are actually taking the software and running it and what ends up resulting is that that's where the state is produced uh on the edges of the extended Commons you have the starting from the kernel moving out into the dis Ros and then you finally have users and users are of course an important part of any Commons or you have the people that are using the software providing feedback uh helping to understand how to improve it um but then we get into corporations and enclosure and uh there's a couple different ways which this happens uh the first one um in the top of that that first diagram would be something like red hat where they have a community distribution uh but they also have uh a fork of that and or it's up stream and downstream and they then create a a corporate product they commercialize the output of the commons and then extract profit from it so that's one way or you can have the the one on the right um in that eighth diagram where there's a much larger company that just makes their own product and so what what I'm trying to show here is these uh companies overlay themselves on the the production process and the the relationships the Norms the ways that the common infrastructure is produced and try to do something with it to their own their own private gain so the ninth diagram they have employees contained within this commercial infrastructure or this commercial wrapper and that gains them access to the relationships of production like I said the governance uh the rights that contributors have as part of this uh Commons production process uh couple caveats um companies buy Enterprise software for a reason they wanted to have a high quality uh a high guarantee of quality they want uh guarantees of support there are reasons why they exist um so this isn't to say that all uh commercially produced software is bad um I just want to point out that there are ways that commercial entities and this is what um Benjamin gets into in his book is that the the the relationship between um commercial entities their their boundaries become porous and start to integrate and overlap with in unexpected ways the the production process of of the common software itself um and the good thing is licenses like the GPL do prevent overt abuse like I said there's it's a digital good you can't claim it for yourself and then the licenses are another defense which prevents people from actually uh claiming this digital good and preventing other people from using it um but over time uh it's possible to um lose uh it's possible to have a a really negative posture towards the common so these examp examples are from the past few years where Red Hat has changed its stance it started as a um a uh purely open source company uh building on Linux and over the years it's changed its stance and uh as a result a lot of Open Source developers are not as comfortable contributing to Red Hat type products um so yeah what matters is their posture towards the commons whether they're contributing in a pro-social way um contributing funding back resources and giving knowledge back to the the the software that's being produced so now let's get into ethereum uh you have cevs again individuals with their own context their own experiences their own desires who want to help build the ethereum protocol passes through again the floss Norms uh additional Norms cyberpunk Norms of things like censorship resistance we want to build protocols which uh can't be compromised or co-opted easily allows users to accomplish what they want with out without necessarily relying on intermediaries um as well as Frameworks like the awward devs call the EIP process these things all help to structure the relationship of these individuals as they produce the ethereum protocol and the uh analogous output to um the Linux kernel is the execution and consensus specs um so again that's the output but a key part of this is the governance process the relationships that people have as they they build this software um so again we we'll look at the extended comp where does State production actually happen uh and astute observers might know I'm using the exact same set of diagrams just with different text because the process is very similar uh so we have the extended Commons people gather to implement the cor specs in a specific way um and today we know that as client teams and node operators not client teams but um specific client implementations which are then uh operated by nodes and they produce in this seventh diagram a single Global State this is an important distinction between uh something like Linux which is um producing single instances of State uh isolated on someone's computer somebody's server and uh which makes it more amenable to enclosure or capture by a private Corporation because they can you know set up a a user um provider relationship where they again give guarantees about how the software will be supported in the future things like that whereas This Global State uh it's it the reason it's valuable the reason it has Network effects is because there's no single party that's providing guarantees right it has um guarantees of decentralization censorship resistance and these come from it uh being a distributed system this this is distributed Ledger that runs on many different machines and produces a single Global output so this is a key difference between something like uh Linux and ethereum and it does provide important benefits because um it's much harder for somebody to capture uh for example to go make their own private chain we all know how that went a few years ago when it was popular to create a Consortium Network or a private chain these things aren't popular or they don't really have a use case because uh it's it's negating the the key benefit of what these public open blockchains are so um to summarize that the key takeaway from that seventh one is that it produces a single global state so what's the analog for corporate entities so l2s are not necessarily all corporate usually they have a foundation or um some nonprofit that's also uh associated with stewarding the layer to but they have a similar relationship to the core they might Fork one of the client uh implementations and create their own version uh they might pay Consulting fees to client teams um these are two of the ways in which they sort of embed themselves with within the commons production process or or the extended Commons that is ethereum State um or in the future we might have a really a large uh Fang company decide to produce their own client and you know they have significant interests outside of the ethereum commons that will trickle into um uh that their interest will trickle into the commons through the employees as shown in the ninth Di so again uh it's probably clear the sequence of diagrams at this point um but I think it's uh just just useful to point out the specific uh ways in which um corporations overlay themselves over the commons over the production of uh these this digital software and what they gain is access like I said exactly in Linux it's the same output or the same outcome where these corporate entities may have um uh the capacity to influence the development of the core protocol uh I don't think this is the case necessarily today but um I guess what I wanted to point out through this this sequence of diagrams is Linux has been doing this for 15 years longer than ethereum and they're a useful um things to look at and learn from this is a very surface level exploration of um you know these two ecosystems but I think it's very interesting the parallels and I think on a deeper exploration uh many more interesting um examples would come to light about co-option or or ways in which commercial entities have abused the knowledge produced by The Commons have abused the relationships that are uh contained within the commons for o their own private gain so um I hope that we will think about this in the future as ethereum continues to grow and just be aware of the influence of commercial or for-profit entities um that being said it nonprofit en entities can be bad too right it doesn't necessarily um mean that all uh nonprofit profits are good it just depends on their posture and their relationship with the production of the commons whether they care about uh having a good relationship with the people who are producing this software um so yeah some more caveats I'm not saying that commercial entities are default bad they do host a lot of useful functions for core contributors some of those like Legal Services training visas health insurance these are important and you know people make the decisions that make sense for them um similarly producing state is not bad obviously we want block space to be uh available to as many people as possible um and the way that you do this is by you know l2s they need to produce State it's going to happen one way or the other um again what matters is your posture back to the commons whether you're giving back whether you're a um a positive contributor to this software that underpins the production of block space um and like I mentioned there are some inherent properties in the ethereum network that are beneficial it produces a global state which which is not as easy to partition and profit from because the benefit is that everybody's producing this single uh Global State um which has Network effects like I said private blockchains were a thing I don't think they will be in the future but maybe maybe I will we'll see uh more caveats I didn't touch on meev which is like commodification squared or like the worst version of of what I touched on here but on an extreme level where you have this supply chain of uh State changes that are are you know mutated and and manipulated in ways to extract even more profit for these these these actors um that's that's an entirely could probably be an entire talk by somebody more experienced with me than I but um yeah this is this is uh because there's a global State this is one of the disadvantages is that there's ordering concerns there's uh a supply chain that exists to extract more value so while there are benefits to a global State there's also some disadvantages um but I also mentioned this before um uh there is what we hope to do in the future is just scale block space to as many people as possible and hopefully avoid the outcome where you have a few large entities who got here early a few large l2s we want to make block space as cheap as possible uh for as many people as possible make it ubiquitous and so this is sort of like a preemptive commodification but without somebody attaching themselves to it or an entity intermediating uh and trying to extract from the the commons block space that's being produced uh and this is where I'm going to bring it back to protocol Guild if you were thirsty for some protocol Guild content another way that you can um avoid intermediation by commercial entities if we're worried about the negative effects that they can have on how the protocol is governed how people engage with it we can uh fund the individuals directly right we give them more autonomy give them them the option to be independent politically independent socially um again not saying that everybody needs to stop working at a company and become the the sovereign individual developer that's a bit insane um but we should have options to fund the individuals who are actually maintaining the commons and producing this this software that everybody else use and cu the protocol Guild which is a collective of 152 core ethereum contributors today so um it's a yeah an onchain mechanism which directly funds individuals hopefully you see the resemblance in that diagram this is the the commons production uh the set of people who are participating in Commons production um uh uh of course it's it's there are more people outside of protocol Guild that help to build the core ethereum protocol the the core Commons then are represented in this organization um but this is this is one such organization that where you can fund the individuals that are actually um making this ethereum Commons and all the ridiculous applications that are building on top of it um possible uh so it's an onchain mechanism if you've never heard of this this is just a really quick intro to what it is and why it's important it's an non-chain mechanism and the funds go directly to individuals so every quarter we update the membership and um try to make sure that it's as accurate as possible uh over the last year we raised and distributed 15 million directly to these individuals and we're uh going to do the same with the next version we're doing some improvements uh uh new smart contract trying to make um the next version of the protocol much more robust and um if you're curious about learning more because it's on chain you can go check out that dashboard right there on Dune um and as the the wrap up to the wrapup uh it's a bit ironic but red hat has already done this in 99 in 1999 they um they ipoed and they collected a list of all the contributors to the the uh the Linux database or the the Linux codebase at the time and they tried to include them in the IPO by giving them some shares uh so it's it's a little ironic that um you know they did this many years ago and now they're you know like I said their Arc has changed for the negative whereas Microsoft has changed uh for the positive for the most part uh and now we're here in ethereum in 2023 and uh hopefully learning from what Linux has done in the past the Linux ecosystem and um maybe taking Tak into account how Corporate incentives corporate entities have intermediated on the common production and uh like I said there's this is a very surface level uh exploration um but hopefully you saw some of the parallels that I've I've found as I'm doing some research and you can uh maybe you have some suggestions or thoughts um about Linux and ethereum the parallels between them um that's all I have thank you for listening