The wider ecommerce industry however has veered in a direction that is leading to more focus being placed on composable microservices hosted in the cloud. Additional solution types, such as SaaS, PaaS, and off-premise, are being increasingly prioritized despite their lack of relevance to businesses at the smaller end of the scale.
This shift has led to mention of the PHP Monolith being decomposed by Adobe’s technical architects. If this happens, the DNA of Magento/Adobe would change forever.
Such a prospect has caused frustration within the Magento Open Source community. Some members have taken it upon themselves to try and direct the community down a more desirable path.
Establishing the Mage Open Source Community Alliance
In September 2021, a selection of companies and individuals committed to establishing a new community organization driven fork of Magento. Named the Mage Open Source Community Alliance, this fork is aiming to help move Magento Open Source forwards and allow smaller businesses thrive in the ecommerce space in a way that befits them.
In an open letter to the Magento Community, the Mage Open Source Community Alliance said:
“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.”
The organization is aiming to earn the trust of the Magento ecosystem in order to enable Magento Open Source to continue to be the asset it is for smaller businesses moving forwards.
“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.”