Thank you to all that turned out to Meet Magento 2023 in New York! It was great to connect with so many of you and share in your hopes and dreams.
We got a lot of questions from people during the conference, and maybe you’ve thought them too. Here are our answers, if so!
Have more questions? Check out our FAQ, or ask away at chat.mage-os.org! We’re an open book.
The Mage-OS Distribution is still just getting started, and so right now there are not a lot of differences between it and Magento Open Source. The first release of Mage-OS already includes a number of improvements, so merchants who like using the bleeding edge are welcome to build on Mage-OS.
At Mage-OS we’re focusing on platform improvements, enhancements, and rapid progress that builds on top of the long-term stability that Magento provides. Both platforms give you full access to the complete ecosystem of Magento providers, extensions, and integrations.
At this time, using Magento Open Source is a great option for most merchants. It’s a great platform for merchants, and more stable and secure than it’s ever been. Should the requirements change, it will always be possible to migrate to Mage-OS at a later time.
Our mission has always been to support the whole Magento ecosystem and allow it to thrive. As such we will always take into account the interests of merchants, agencies, extension vendors, and other service providers that need an easy integration path to the platform.
Our intention is to keep the Mage-OS Distribution as compatible as possible with Magento extensions and solutions, for as long as possible. There will be differences as fixes and improvements are made to Mage-OS, but those should be of limited scope and won’t involve major changes to the nature of how Magento works.
Any solutions that work for Magento should also work for Mage-OS with little or no changes, and anyone that learns Magento or Mage-OS programming will be able to work with the other too.
We are also working with some extension vendors, like Amasty. By testing their extensions on Mage-OS we gather valuable insight in compatibility. We welcome any extension vendors and integrators to join the effort and do the same.
Good question! This is right up the alley of Magento Association, and they’re jumping right into that with the creation of a new magento-opensource.com website for the purpose. If you’re interested in getting involved with that, get in touch with the MA Content Committee.
We are focusing mostly on the technical and business sides of the ecosystem. Marketing, outreach, and sales can be expensive. Between wanting to put our resources to the best use, and not having access to the Magento brand, we believe our efforts are best spent strengthening the platform and ecosystem.
We’re focusing on different things. Our aim is to collaboratively cover all the activities that will help strengthen the Magento ecosystem.
The Magento Association, which has an agreement with Adobe to use the Magento brand, is focused primarily on the ownership of that brand and everything that goes along with that – marketing, events, content, and outreach. All of those things are massively important! And the MA, Meet Magento, and people involved with them have done a great job with them.
Mage-OS is focused primarily on enhancement, longevity, and innovation of the Magento platform. That includes bug fixes, performance improvements, modernization, and more. It also means elevating and empowering others in the ecosystem to reach further and work better. We’ll do that through exposure, development tools and workflows, easier setup processes and environments, documentation, and more.
We are totally open to collaborating with Magento Association where possible, and we are actively discussing with them where and how we can do so.
The Magento Association’s focus and goals are currently different and distinct from those of Mage-OS (as discussed above). If the Magento Association comes to fulfill all the purposes of Mage-OS, then that’s great! We would love to be redundant. But for now, we expect that the associations will continue in generally the same direction they are now and have very supportive roles.
If all goes well, success on the part of Magento Association in increasing Magento brand awareness would likely increase adoption of the Mage-OS Distribution in the process, and vice versa.
That’s not our decision to make, but we’re open to all arrangements that benefit the Magento community.
- Communication is essential.
- Empowerment is essential.
- Owning your own destiny is essential.
Mage-OS is run by the community and the agencies and vendors within it. We will not be competing with any integrator or service provider in the ecosystem, to the best of our ability. Our goal is to uplift and support the ecosystem, not cannibalize it, and agencies are a critical part of that. Since Mage-OS is run by the community, the members can ensure any services do not endanger their business.
By offering service level agreements and extended long-term support for the core platform, our goal is to enable agencies to sell their services to merchants that require vendor support.
The Mage-OS support company will allow a merchant to pay for a guarantee of support and fixes to the Mage-OS core. It will not extend to any extensions, customizations, integrations, consulting, or development services – all of which would be referred back to the merchant’s agency/developer or to the Mage-OS partners list if they don’t have one.
Our intention is to supplement agency offerings, and enhance the appeal of the Mage-OS/Magento platform to an agency’s merchants and prospects by offloading support responsibility of the core platform. This would function in many ways like Adobe Commerce Support, which every Commerce partner already interacts with.
This is a major part of our plan for Mage-OS, on several counts:
- Any profit from the support services company will feed back to the Mage-OS Association to put toward development of Mage-OS itself, through development grants and community empowerment.
- Any bug fixes completed in the course of support services will become part of Mage-OS, and available to everyone.
- Software support and reliance can be a major consideration for merchants when deciding on a platform. This is something not directly available to SMB merchants right now, except through Adobe Commerce licensing.
The Mage-OS Distribution and brand are fully owned by the non-profit Mage-OS Association, and the association is owned and run entirely by its members.
This was a major consideration of ours when forming Mage-OS, based on the learned experiences of other open source projects. We believe in open source, and believe in Mage-OS staying truly open source. The Mage-OS Association is bound by the operating rules of its legal statutes, and those include member approval for any sale, transfer, or merging of assets or Mage-OS as a whole (per articles 27 and 30 of the Mage-OS Association statutes).
Any person can become a member of the Mage-OS Association, for as little as 10 EUR a year.
We believe we need both, and we are working on it from every angle. Please join us! You can help or follow along with everything we’re doing at chat.mage-os.org .
We would love for Adobe to release the Magento brand and trademarks in full to the Magento Association. That being said, it is a valuable asset that Adobe purchased and owns, so we have to be realistic that it’s not likely to happen.
Overall, Mage-OS is working on guaranteeing the longevity of the Magento ecosystem, not on specific individual features.
There are a number of technical projects we expect to see meaningful progress on within the next year, including reducing technical debt by cleaning up the module dependency graph, a better onboarding experience for new developers, revamping the indexer system, and other performance improvements.
We believe these improvements will lead to a reduced total cost of ownership for merchants, which in turn will make the ecosystem more competitive for agencies to offer and work with.
We appreciate all the work Parul and the Community Engineering team is doing! Because all changes to Magento Open Source are merged into Mage-OS, every improvement to the platform works to the benefit of all. By all means, people should continue submitting code to Magento and help with processing of pull requests!
That being said, there are limits to what Adobe will allow to change in Magento Open Source because it’s the foundation of their Adobe Commerce product suite. Essentially, these limitations mean no new meaningful features are likely to come in the core codebase. In the past there have been issues with speed of the contribution cycle and with developer trust, of no fault of Parul or the current Community Engineering team. On both counts, we can help by providing an outlet and processes for developers to fulfill their dreams.
We are optimistic about collaborating with Magento and the Community Engineering team. Our goal is to ensure that contributions made within Mage-OS are effective and tested in real-world scenarios, so they could be seamlessly integrated into Magento.
Want to learn more or join in?
