MCP Protocol Debate: 'IP Theft' is Standard Chip Design Practice

If chip design has an unspoken rule about "IP core reuse," then the open-source ecosystem for AI agent protocols is all about the jungle law: "whoever gets it running first wins." Runlayer accusing Rippling of "stealing its product idea" reminds me of when Unisoc was working on 5G basebands, and a top-tier manufacturer directly "borrowed" our power management architecture—they didn't even bother changing the register names. This kind of thing isn't new in engineering circles, but applied to the emerging MCP (Model Context Protocol) standard, it exposes a trickier problem in the AI agent ecosystem: what do you do when your open protocol becomes someone else's springboard for commercialization?