Open letter to the Magento Community
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, Fisheye Media Ltd.
- Tomas Gerulaitis
(Please note our follow up post on 28. September 2021.)