On September 14, 2012 Willem Wigman and Vinai Kopp from Hyvä Themes together with other community members published an open letter (also included below) to the Magento community to announce a new initiative that will focus on safeguarding the future of Magento Open Source.
The Issue
Magento has historically been a PHP framework that combines backend and frontend into one. Also called a Monolith.
Various members of the Magento community are concerned that the direction of Magento under Adobe will lead to the deprecation of this Monolith. In fact, it has been presented by Adobe engineers. They believe the SMB (small and medium sized merchants) market is best served by this Monolith (and in many cases this is true even for big enterprises). Besides that, many love the Magento Monolith and want to keep working with it for years to come.
They even think it has not reached its full potential, due to the lack of attention and stagnation of innovation in the recent years.
The Purpose
Firstly, they think it’s important to simplify contributions and innovation to the Magento Platform. In order to do this, they will need a community fork of the Magento codebase. They will keep that fork in sync with the official Magento repositories, for as long as possible. They will do that by creating and nurturing an upstream compatible fork of Magento Open Source that embraces innovation.
Secondly, they need an entity that can provide the means to support and maintain this fork, and the surrounding community. The Magento Association could possibly fulfil this role, if it were able to become more independent and get the support of the community. Therefore, it should exclusively serve the interest of the community. They are actively communicating with the Magento Association to explore possibilities to align their visions for the future.
The People
This initiative is started by a number of companies and individuals from the Magento community, because they feel it is essential to be able to plan their future and openly discuss the possible consequences of Adobe deprecating the Magento Monolith sometime in the future. They will anticipate multiple scenario’s while they wait for Adobe to decide on their public roadmap. What they won’t do is sit idle and wait.
The community has always driven Magento’s success and, if needed, they will step up and provide the means to carry Magento into the future. There are some great examples of community led open-source platforms that they have examined closely and they believe the same is possible for Magento. Ideally, the Magento Association would take this form.
The plan
- Gather people from the community and get attention for the problem at hand
- Collectively request a public roadmap and open-source strategy from Adobe
- Join forces in setting up the infrastructure for a Community Magento fork
- Explore possibilities of collaboration with the Association and Adobe
- If required, form a community-owned organization with its primary objective to maintain and further develop Magento
Open letter to the Magento Community
This was first published yesterday on mage-os.community, if you want to be part of this initiative, please also sign the form. The picture above is from Meet Magento Switzerland 2014.
Dear Magento community,
With this open announcement we are letting you know that there will be a community organization driven fork of Magento. The purpose is to secure Magento’s long term viability for all the businesses depending on it.
Why do we believe this is the right step?
The Magento ecosystem is big. It’s been the dominant platform for eCommerce for a decade. It has driven innovation in eCommerce and empowered businesses of all sizes. Full of novel ideas born through a vibrant community, it is still unparalleled by any other eCommerce ecosystem out there.
The eCommerce landscape has changed over the years, now offering a wealth of SaaS, PaaS, and other off-premise solutions. Magento under Adobe has determined to do the same. The community is still there, but the enterprise product – now called Adobe Commerce – is moving towards composable microservices hosted in the cloud, only suitable for the largest merchants.
There has been talk about decomposition of the PHP Monolith by Adobe’s technical architects, meaning all parts of the PHP platform will be replaced by (Adobe) microservices. Ultimately, the entire Magento platform as we know it will be replaced.
For reference, this was presented at Adobe Summit 2021 in the talk “Extending Magento Commerce with Adobe I/O”.
This makes for a lot of unknown variables. There is no public roadmap for Magento Open Source, and this has left a lot of the community (who believe the monolith is a very valid approach in many cases) feeling uneasy about the future of Magento.
So, we want to move forward. We believe we, the community, can maintain and evolve a fork in a way that will carry us into the future.
We intend for this to be a collaborative effort, ideally together with the Magento Association, and (through them) with Adobe. We have already reached out to the Magento Association to work with them, but it will take time to build a common understanding of how to move forward.
The fork will be upstream-compatible with Magento Open Source as long as it is supported by Adobe. That means, when the monolith is ultimately deprecated, all companies who want to remain on the monolith platform will be able to do so.
We want to earn the trust of the Magento ecosystem. We truly believe we can not only keep Magento alive, we can give it a bright future by putting the focus on merchants, big AND small.
This is only the beginning. Magento has a bright future ahead. We invite you to join us.
This initiative has been started by the companies and individuals signed below. If you want to publicly show your endorsement and be informed on future updates, please sign this open letter using the form below.
- Willem Wigman, Hyvä Themes B.V.
- Vinai Kopp, Hyvä Themes B.V.
- Andreas von Studnitz, integer_net GmbH
- Fabian Schmengler, integer_net GmbH
- Ignacio Riesco, Interactiv4 S.L.
- Óscar Recio, Interactiv4 S.L.
- Peter Jaap Blaakmeer, elgentos
- Wouter Steenmeijer, elgentos
- Jeroen Boersma, elgentos
- Kuba Zwolinski, snow.dog
- Kamil Balwierz, snow.dog
- Bartek Igielski, snow.dog
- Simon Sprankel, CustomGento GmbH
- Ryan Hoerr, ParadoxLabs, Inc
- Thien-Lan Weber, OneStepCheckout
- Alessandro Ronchi, Magento Community Maintainer
- John Hughes
- Tomas Gerulaitis
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