Google pushes common standard for agentic commerce
Plus: AI coding agents force a rethink of open source economics
Hi folks,
This week’s lead story looks at Google’s push to standardise “agentic commerce” with the Universal Commerce Protocol, an attempt to reduce fragmentation as AI shopping agents move closer to real-world use.
There’s also a deep dive into the economics of AI-driven developer tooling, as open-source coding agent Kilo Code rolls out a paid subscription following a fresh funding round. Elsewhere, Cloudflare snaps up the team behind the open source Astro framework, signalling continued consolidation around high-performance web tooling.
And there’s much more….
As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.
Paul
Open issue
A lingua franca for agentic commerce
Online commerce is fragmented, with retailers exposing inventory, pricing, and checkout through bespoke integrations. And as much-hyped AI shopping agents move closer to prime time, that fragmentation becomes a bottleneck because there is no single, standard way for agents to browse products, compare prices, and actually buy things.
Google is addressing this with the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open, standardized protocol designed to let retailers, platforms, and AI agents communicate using a shared commerce language.
“As consumers embrace conversational experiences, they expect seamless transitions from brainstorming and research to final purchase,” the company wrote in a blog post. “That means it’s critical to support real-time inventory checks, dynamic pricing, and instant transactions, all within the user’s current conversational context.”
UCP defines shared schemas for products, offers, availability, fulfillment, and checkout flows, allowing AI agents to discover and complete purchases without custom integrations for each merchant. Google frames the protocol as infrastructure for “agentic commerce,” intended to be interoperable and adopted across the ecosystem rather than locked to a single platform.
Whether UCP gains traction will depend on adoption beyond Google’s own tooling, but its launch already involves a broad slice of the commerce ecosystem. The protocol is being developed in collaboration with retailers including Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Walmart, while it’s “endorsed” by partners including Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy’s, Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa, and Zalando reflecting a broader industry acknowledgement that agent-driven commerce will require common infrastructure.
Patch notes
Kilo Code takes on AI development economics
In my latest COSS Corner column on Forkable, I chatted with Kilo Code CEO Scott Breitenother about the project’s attempt to build an open source AI coding agent in a developer ecosystem shaped by closed platforms.
Kilo Code, fresh from an $8m funding round, helps developers plan, write, refactor, and debug software using AI. Its latest move highlights a growing tension in developer tooling: while open source has traditionally relied on shared code and community contribution, AI agents bring ongoing compute costs that don’t fit neatly with existing OSS funding models.
Read more: Forkable
Cloudflare acqui-hires Astro web framework team
Cloudflare has acquired the team behind the open source Astro web framework as part of its push to accelerate high-performance web development. The company says the Astro team will continue building tools focused on speed, simplicity, and modern web architecture, with Astro remaining open source.
Read more: Cloudflare
NetBird nabs $10m for open source network security
NetBird has raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding to expand development of its open source VPN and secure networking platform, positioned as a modern alternative to legacy enterprise VPNs.
Read more: Tech.eu
Signal creator turns attention to AI infrastructure
Moxie Marlinspike, best known as founder of open source messaging app Signal, is exploring how similar principles could be applied to AI systems.
As per an Ars Technica report this week, his focus with a new open source AI assistant dubbed Confer is on reducing centralization and opacity in AI tooling, arguing that without deliberate design choices, AI risks repeating the same trust and control failures seen in earlier platforms.
Read more: Ars Technica & Confer
Elon Musk says X algorithm will go open source
Elon Musk — not for the first time — has said that X plans to open source its recommendation algorithm, publishing the code that shapes what users see on the platform. The move is pitched as a transparency effort, though it remains unclear which components will actually be released, how usable the code will be in practice, or whether meaningful oversight will follow from making the algorithm public.
Read more: The Verge
Anthropic commits $1.5m to Python security
Claude Code creator Anthropic has committed $1.5 million to fund security improvements across the open source Python ecosystem, supporting maintainers and projects that underpin large parts of modern software and AI development. The funding is aimed at audits, tooling, and long-term maintenance, reflecting growing recognition that widely used open source dependencies remain under-resourced despite their critical role.
Read more: The New Stack
A warning on AI vs. open source economics
In a LinkedIn post this week that went somewhat viral, freelance engineer Marc J. Schmidt argues that AI coding agents are undermining the monetization models that have historically sustained popular open-source projects, forcing developers and maintainers to reconsider open distribution in favor of paid access or API-style gating. His core claim is that open source has long been funded by human attention (e.g. documentation visits, reputation, and expertise that convert users into customers) and that agent-driven development bypasses those attention funnels entirely, breaking the traditional economics of OSS.
The debate has been spotlighted by recent real-world developments in the web ecosystem: Tailwind Labs, the company behind the widely used Tailwind CSS framework, laid off about 75 % of its engineering team after revenue reportedly plunged around 80 % despite record usage, with its founder linking the decline to AI tools reducing traffic to documentation — the very channel that used to expose developers to paid products.
Read more: Marc J. Schmidt on LinkedIn
And finally…
A new lens on open source
Mentra, a startup building developer-focused wearable tech, has announced plans to start shipping its first smart glasses, Mentra Live, which are positioned as an open source alternative to the likes of Meta’s Ray-Bans. The device runs MentraOS, an open source operating system, and includes a built-in MiniApp Store and SDK that let developers build and install apps directly on the glasses.
Weighing around 43 grams, Mentra Live features a 12 MP camera for photos and HD livestreaming, along with support for calls, music, captions, and AI-powered features. The first limited batch of 1,000 units is set to ship from February 15, priced at $299, with further releases planned later this year.
Read more: Engadget & Mentra