Today we've published an open letter to the Magento community to announce a new initiative that will focus on safeguarding the future of open source Magento.
The Issue
Magento has historically been a PHP framework that combines backend and frontend into one. Also called a Monolith.
We 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.
We believe the SMB market is best served by this Monolith (and in many cases this is true even for big enterprises).
Besides that, we love the Magento Monolith and we want to keep working with it for years to come.
We 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, we think it's important to simplify contributions and innovation to the Magento Platform. In order to do this, we'll need a community fork of the Magento codebase.
We'll keep that fork in sync with the official Magento repositories, for as long as possible.
We will do that by creating and nurturing an upstream compatible fork of Magento Open Source that embraces innovation.
Secondly, we need an entity that can provide the means to support and maintain this fork, and the surrounding community.
The Magento Association could possibly fulfill this role, if it were able to become more independent and get the support of our community. Therefore, it should exclusively serve the interest of the community.
We are actively communicating with the Magento Association to explore possibilities to align our visions for the future.
The People
This initiative is started by a number of companies and individuals from the Magento community, because we feel it is essential to be able to plan our future and openly discuss the possible consequences of Adobe deprecating the Magento Monolith sometime in the future. We will anticipate multiple scenario's while we await Adobe to decide on their public roadmap.
What we won't do is sit idle and wait.
The community has always driven Magento's success and, if needed, we 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 we have examined closely and we 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
Please read the full letter and show your support by adding your name to the post if you want to join us.
