The future of Magento Open Source has attracted a lot of attention in recent weeks with an open letter being written to the Magento Community voicing concerns about where the platform is headed.
An initiative for a Magento fork is being driven by the Magento community which proposes to secure Magento’s long term viability for merchants of all sizes. This would be a substantial change to the platform’s ecosystem but there are already some big names from within the Magento community publicly backing the initiative.
What has led us here?
It’s no surprise that the eCommerce landscape has changed quite a bit over the years. The market is now rich with various SaaS, PaaS and other off-premise eCommerce solutions. And Magento is no exception, there has been a lot of change.
While the Magento community still stands strong, the enterprise product (now known as Adobe Commerce) is moving towards being a cloud hosted solution which in nature is simply most suited to larger merchants. Before we go into this some more, first, let’s cover a little bit of the background to understand why things are where they are today.
From Magento Commerce to Adobe Commerce
As we approached the three-year anniversary of Adobe’s acquisition of Magento Commerce, a big change has since occurred. The branding has officially been consolidated from Magento Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud to the single brand of Adobe Commerce. At the time, it was said that the Magento Open Source branding and support would not be impacted.
However, at the Adobe Summit 2021, a talk was presented on “Extending Magento Commerce with Adobe I/O”. This basically covered the decomposition of the PHP Monolith by Adobe’s technical architects which means all parts of the PHP platform would be replaced by Adobe microservices. In other words, the entire Magento platform as we know it will be replaced.
The result of this? A whole lot of uncertainty for Magento Open Source. Combined with the lack of a public roadmap, it’s not surprising that many members of the Magento community feel uneasy about its future.
A fork in the road
The Magento community wants to move forward, and they believe they can make this happen. A fork has been proposed that will carry the platform into the future through a collaborative approach. Ideally, this will occur together with the Magento Association and Adobe.
How would this work?
You may wonder what impact this could have on the way you work with Magento. So far, we know that the proposed fork will be upstream-compatible with Magento Open Source while it remains supported by Adobe.
This means that when the PHP Monolith is eventually made obsolete, all merchants who want to remain on the monolith platform can.
In the open letter from the Magento Community, their stance on the fork was highlighted saying:
“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.”
What’s next?
We’ll be keeping a close eye on any further advancements to the future of Magento 2 Open Source and news within the Magento community. In the meantime, if you want to chat more about what has already been published, get in touch with our team of Magento experts who’ll be happy to talk.
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