The acquisition of open source software is always taken with a grain of salt. The communities and users do not appreciate it.
The open source software is developed by the communities, and communities feel betrayed when the private organization takes over. Organizations provide the private version of the OS software, and hence have a conflict of interest with the OS version. So, intentionally or not, they tend to mess up the OS software, alienating the community and taking away the user base.
People didn’t like it when Oracle acquired MySQL. The community made the fork of MySQL – MariaDB. In the beginning, both the products were same, but they took the different route from there as the team managing them were different.
Same is happening with Magento. Adobe acquired it, and the community is not sure about the future of Magento under Adobe. So several responsible members take it in their hands to find the solution.
Lets’ see, what is Mage-OS.
What is Mage-OS
Mage-OS is an open initiative to ensure the accessibility, longevity, and success of the Magento® platform and ecosystem. The Mage-OS Distribution is a backwards compatible, lightweight version of Magento Open Source packages.
This includes changes and new features compared to Magento, as contributed by volunteers like you. The team aims to keep the Mage-OS compatible with all existing Magento 2 extensions and integrations as much as possible. Some packages will contain changes, and some will be entirely new. Mage-OS is incorporated in Poland, but is represented worldwide.
Who Created Mage-OS?
The Mage-OS Association is a non-profit association formed by people within the Magento community to represent and further the interests of that community as a whole: Merchants, developers, agencies, and all of the many people supporting and supported by this ecosystem.
Why Creating Mage-OS?
The ideas behind Mage-OS were first shared in an open letter about the future of Magento. That letter prompted discussions and action across the community. The letter was signed by 1,641 people that use, develop, or otherwise depend on Magento for a living. Mage-OS brings the ideas of that letter to life.
The primary reason were:
- Adobe Commerce is introducing the composable microservices. These cloud hosted services are only suitable for large merchants. This topic was briefly covered by Igor Miniailo and Nishant Kapoor in Extending Magento Commerce with Adobe I/O talk. This basically means the decomposition of the PHP Monolith.
- Community who believe the monolith is a valid approach feels uneasy about the future of Magento
- No clear direction on the Open Source product compared to the amount of communication and marketing around Adobe Commerce
- A growing disconnect between Adobe and the Community as a result of dissatisfaction around the Open Source contribution model, lack of communication, and lack of a clear roadmap
- Leadership at Adobe changed and core members with strategic positions left. There was no replacement for these figures and a lack of business case for further investment into Open Source
How does Mage-OS help?
The Mgae-OS tends to solve all of this.
- When the monolith is ultimately deprecated, all companies who want to remain on the monolith platform will be able to do so with the Mage-OS.
- It’s going to be a collaborative effort, ideally together with the Magento Association, and (through them) with Adobe.
- Keep Magento alive, and give it a bright future by putting the focus on merchants, both big and small.
- Compatible with all existing Magento 2 extensions and integrations.
- More accessible to developers.
- Composed of a default lightweight package selection.
- Faster integration of PRs.
- Simple migration to Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce.
Difference between Mage-OS, Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce?
| Mage-OS | Magento Open Source | Adobe Commerce |
| Independent | Adobe | Adobe |
| Open source | Open source | Close source |
| Community driven | Adobe team | Adobe Team |
| Lightweight packages | Lightweight packages | Nope |
| Monolith approach | Microservice | Microservice |
More about Mage-OS
This article contains the snippet and inspiration from the listed below articles. If you want to read more about Mage-OS, you can read more information here:
- https://mage-os.org/ – Official Website
- https://twitter.com/mage_os – Official Twitter
- https://mage-os.org/organization/about – About Mage-OS
- https://mage-os.org/blog/the-future-of-magento – Open letter to the Magento Community
- https://mage-os.org/distribution – About the Mage-OS Distribution
- https://github.com/mage-os – GitHub Code
- https://mage-os.org/get-involved – Involve with Mage-OS
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-mage-os-why-you-should-aware-peter-rusin/ – Excellent LinkedIn article by Peter Rusin
- https://mage-os.org/blog/20221102-mageos-distro-repos-and-more – Mage-OS Distribution Repositories
Is it the right direction?
Community creating a fork of acquired software is not something new. But to maintain it and keep up the quality is a challenging job. The team and people working on it are good and known name of the Magento ecosystem. We believe this is the right direction for Magento.
Does Breeze support Mage-OS?
Breeze supports the Mage-OS initiative. And we will be following the development closely. Once a reliable and stable version is released, we will add the Mage-OS to our product. Zeeshan Jamal, product manager of Breeze Cloud Platform has discussed this extensively in the tech-meeting.
If you have any questions and doubts, you can leave them in the comment section.
