Re: Open letter to the Magento Community

This is my personal perspective on "The Future of Magento Open Source" as written down at https://www.mage-os.community/blog/the-future-of-magento + https://hyva.io/blog/news/the-future-of-magento-open-source.html* and why I haven't signed the petition.

Disclaimer/Context:

I've been part of the Magento community since founding the local Dutchento.org community in the summer of 2008, organized many Meet Magento events, attended even more, Magento Master 2019, etc. etc.

Specifically relevant for this is that I've been part of the founding task force and subsequent inaugural board of the Magento Association. I've resigned from that position this month. I'm leaving because next month I will be joining Spryker, not because I don't believe in what the MA stands for. To prevent any potential conflict of interest I decided to step down from my board position at the Magento Association. This - again - means that this is my personal reaction and it does not reflect the viewpoint of the MA board.

Forking: I'm not saying it can't be done...

... but it's not easy. Not many have become a success and you'll need quite a bit more than an open letter and people signing it. I've witnessed a very successful fork up close in the early 2000's when Joomla! was formed from Mambo. But in that case, all core developers resigned (taking away all of the momentum from the original project), they incorporated quickly, brought over the majority of the community (including many paying customers) and kept the momentum going.

Reading the letter I feel "forking" is very much underestimated and overvalued. I've lived through it with Mambo/Joomla! before and although that was a decent success in the end, it was a huge undertaking and success if far from guaranteed. We've tried a better way through the Magento Association for the last couple of years. These experiences have inevitably biased me in many ways, but hopefully I can give you a useful perspective on this.

What I agree with

I share similar worries mentioned in these posts. In the past 13 years a lot of merchants, agencies and other additional services have built their livelihoods on the Magento platform. Seeing it not getting the love that it did before, not only hurts in your soul, it might even threaten the future of your company.

It's also disappointing to see that Adobe hasn't handed over more control of the open source project to the community / Magento Association (yet). A lot has happened behind the scenes, but there’s a lot of red tape to go through and it seems there is little incentive for Adobe to make any haste with this. I see many benefits in this, including benefits for Adobe, so to keep pushing this point through the right channels is definitely important.

Challenges I see

TL;DR: Open letters and signing them don't change anything, How is the Allience different from what we have now and finally: Forking brings A LOT of challenges

1) Open letters and signing them don't change anything

Awesome, you have 1000+ signed up. Maybe 10.000 in a month. It's a vanity metric. How is this going to incentivize Adobe? How is this going to incentivize any? merchant or? developer to switch to your fork?

Magento "lost it's way" before. I literally stated this in a presentation in 2014. Replace "eBay" with "Adobe" and update the logo and it's like nothing changed. That's 7 years ago and many of us are still here. There have also been other open letters addressing similar things by Alan Storm in 2016, by Muliadi Jeo and Sonal Puri in 2019.? Pointing out that Magento has lost its way as a community didn't have much - if any - impact on Magento's governance or direction of the product.

2) How is the Alliance different?

It's unclear to me what is different with this initiative compared to what is already available in the Magento community.

What does “We invite you to join us.” mean in this case? Join what? To be fair: I've heard outsiders say the same about the Magento Association, but for an Alliance that apparently wants to set itself apart... please then tell us how this is different and what "joining you" means.

In terms of forking: there already are forks for both M1 and M2. How is this different?

There is now also an Open Source Task Force within the Magento Association (open applications to participate as a group member ran until Sept 10th). The Alliance says it intends to work with MA and Adobe so again: how is this different then? I mean: glad to hear that you want to cooperate, but then what's the need of a separate Alliance?

3) Forking brings A LOT of challenges

Forking an existing code base is a weighty decision: one that forces the many parties reliant on the software to choose one option or the other (Examples of successful open source forks). The Joomla! team did it in a remarkable way, but that is not what I see happening here. You only fork when you have exhausted all other options.

A) You can bring the code, but everything else will have to start from scratch.

If you want others to take it seriously, it can't just be a group of friends coding together. You'll need to incorporate, register (and defend) trademarks, create your bylaws, arrange project governance, and get funding. How do I know this? We did all of that with the Magento Association.

Included in this: You won't be able to call it "Magento"

Adobe owns the global trademark for Magento. Adobe has granted use of that name to the Magento Association.

You can copy it, but you'll need to rename it. Massive marketing/branding/legal challenge if you ask me (I've seen this happen with Joomla! and it wasn't easy).

B) You're fragmenting the community

Magento is a mature product with thousands of websites, agencies and individuals relying on it working properly. Fragmenting the landscape is not in their favor. It might be great for developers, but what’s the business case/benefit right now for all those companies out there making money with Magento? What assurances can you give them right now that is better than what Adobe can do? How will you build that momentum? Even if the fork becomes a viable option, you'll inevitably be forcing people to choose which platform they're running and thereby fragment the landscape.

Continuing the current open source project is still your best option

What any open source project (or a fork) needs for continued success:

1. Fulfill a need in the market. Magento does this so - in terms of the code/functionality - you have this covered;
2. Have a large (preferably increasing) install base. This means having enough merchants that believe that they can keep using the product for whatever lifespan they projected for using it. This includes having access to enough agencies/developers to make that happen;
3. A community that is incentivized to put money/time/effort in it. This usually means that - in the end - they'll need to be making a decent amount of money out of it.

For now, I think the ideal way forward is still through Adobe letting go of Magento Open Source and the community picking that up. And the Magento Association is still the best vehicle to facilitate this. The legal entity is already there. The link with Adobe is already there. And you don't have all the issues and struggles that come with creating a fork.

I get that many currently have an issue with Adobe mainly focussing on Adobe Commerce for Enterprise clients and feel that there is no future for open source within Adobe. Even if that is the case: have you tried everything within your power to try to continue the current open source project in a way that doesn't include a fork?

You are already a part of the community and the association. You already have multiple ways to try to make this happen, before forking.

Most of the people that wrote or signed the letter never tried doing this through the Magento Association. And if they didn't stand-up through the entity we created to do things like this, why should I have more trust in them doing it through... writing open letters?

Some suggestions for next steps:

1. Watch the livestream from Meet Magento Poland on this topic next week Monday (Set a reminder here);
2. Watch a second livestream next week with me, TJ Gamble and others (I will link to it here when we have set a date and time);
3. Join the Magento Association and contribute to their Open Source Task Force (or any other committee for that matter);
4. Sign whatever open letters you want but don't expect changes just because of that.

Conclusion

If you co-wrote or signed the original open letter and my words made you feel things: awesome! You all love e-commerce. You all love Magento. I wish you the best of luck in creating your future with Magento.

Make it an upside-down-fork, bringing everyone together instead of fragmenting. From the bottom of my heart, I hope you'll succeed.

__________________________________

FYI, here are some other reaction posts:

• Reddit
• Marius Strajeru
• Brent Peterson

* The Alliance announcement is split over multiple websites/posts posted on the same day but with different information in it? This doesn't really help to get a clear picture of what the Alliance wants and to clearly respond to it. Looks like the group agreed on one text and then a subgroup wrote a different version with another plan ????♂?