Tim O'Reilly at AgentCon: open architecture beats open-source licenses for the agentic web
bibryam · x · 2026-11-05
At AgentCon, Tim O'Reilly argued the AI economy is missing an 'architecture of participation.' Key points:
- Open architecture matters more than open-source licenses; Unix won through participation, not just open code
- MCP brings that principle to the agentic web — open protocols and open memory enable participation, while closed APIs and locked-in memory concentrate control
The slide also maps today's exploratory phase of AI mechanism design: cooperating agents (MCP, A2A), rights management (RSL, AIPREF, CC Signals), bot control (Web Bot Auth, Pay Per Crawl), payments (x402, AP2, ACP, Visa/Mastercard agent protocols), and discovery/identity (Agent Cards, MCP Registry, ERC-8004). Most of these didn't exist two years ago — and most won't survive in their current form.
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