Comment by jpmcb

16 hours ago

It feels far too early for a protocol that's barely a year old with so much turbulence to be donated into its own foundation under the LF.

Alot of people don't realize this, but the foundations that wrap up to the LF have revenue pipelines that are supported by those foundations events (like Kubecon brings in ALOT of money for the CNCF), courses, certifications, etc. And, by proxy, the projects support those revenue streams for the foundations they're in. The flywheel is _supposed_ to be that companies donate to the foundation, those companies support the projects with engineering resources, they get a booth at the event for marketing, and the LF can ensure the health and well-being of the ecosystem and foundation through technical oversight committees, elections, a service-desk, owning the domains, etc.

I don't see how MCP supports that revenue stream nor does it seem like a good idea at this stage: why get a certification for "Certified MCP Developer" when the protocol is evolving so quickly and we've yet to figure how OAuth is going to work in a sane manner?

Mature projects like Kuberentes becoming the backbone of a foundation, like it did with CNCF, makes alot of sense: it was a relatively proven technology at Google that had alot of practical use cases for the emerging world of "cloud" and containers. MCP, at least for me, has not yet proven it's robustness as a mature and stable project: I'd put it into the "sandbox" category of projects which are still rapidly evolving and proving their value. I would have much preferred for Anthropic and a small strike team of engaged developers to move fast and fix alot of the issues in the protocol vs. it getting donated and slowing to a crawl.

At the same time, the protocol's adoption has been 10x faster than Kubernetes, so if you count by this metric, it actually makes sense to donate it now to let others actors in. For instance, without this Google will never fully commit to MCP.

  • comparing kubernetes to what amounts to a subdirectory of shell scripts and their man pages is... brave?

    • Shell scripts written by nearly every product company out there.

      There are lots of small and niche projects under the Linux Foundation. What matters for MCP right now is the vendor neutrality.

      7 replies →

    • For what it's worth, I don't write MCP servers that are shell scripts. I have ones that are http servers that load data from a database. It's nothing really all that more exciting than a REST API with an MCP front end thrown on top.

      Many people only use local MCP resources, which is fine... it provides access to your specific environment.

      For me however, it's been great to be able to have a remote MCP HTTP server that responds to requests from more than just me. Or to make the entire chat server (with pre-configured remote MCP servers) accessible to a wider (company internal) audience.

      1 reply →

I don't see a future in MCP; this is grandstanding at at it's finest.