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Guest Talk with Trent Van Epps | Capital and Enclosure in Software Commons: Linux & Ethereum

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Trent Van Epps, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and steward of Protocol Guild, presents a framework distinguishing capital and commons modes of production, then applies it to case studies of Linux (and Red Hat's gradual enclosure of CentOS) and Ethereum. He argues Ethereum is unique among software commons because it contains embedded capital circuits (proof-of-stake ETH, MEV, liquid staking) and produces a single globally-bound state object, raising the question of whether this containment stabilizes or dooms the commons to capture, and proposes Protocol Guild's unaffiliated funding model as a partial countermeasure.

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anti-rival-and-symbiotic-goods commons-vs-capital-modes-of-production embedded-capital-circuits-in-ethereum-l1 enclosureincorporation-of-software-commons governance guest-talks organizations protocol-guild-unaffiliated-stewardship protocols research