One word: Love. It started with a letter, it went forward with a fork that was more like a distribution which is yet to be released, it is a movement. Here's our feelings towards Mage-OS (and hence a personal vision).
Friction in the community
It all started when Magento was taken over by Adobe and Adobe didn't know what to do with it. They started to integrate Magento into the Adobe cloud, where things like PWA, React and GraphQL had already existed for some time, but where commerce was lacking. It's not that bad that things change. However, for the Magento open source community, it showed that there was no roadmap, no plans for the open source parts, no strategy for the low-to-mid-range merchants (or: Adobe Commerce customers). Finally, the shit hit the fan when Adobe started to proclaim that Magento was now to be named Adobe Commerce (seemingly dropping the free version as a product).
Somewhere in that era, people started to wonder if it would not be better if the open source version would be fully in the hands of the community: A roadmap handled by the community, commits handled by the community, etcetera. This is where the Magento Association was supposed to step in, but they took longer than desired. And people who got tired of waiting started the Mage-OS initiative.
Mage-OS now
Currently, a lot of hard work is done under the hood: A legal association was created and a new site is setup to tell what is going on. But on the product-level, things are also taking shape (thanks to people like Vinai and Damian and many more): The original Magento sources on GitHub are pulled into a separate repository, parsed, modified and more, to make sure that all composer packages are correctly packaged via composer, to make sure all versioning happens in an understandable way, to make sure other modifications happen on the fly (like renaming the vendor from magento to mage-os). And all of this is slowly leading to a single point in time: The moment that a release of Mage-OS is made that is different from the release of Magento Open Source.
At that moment, we need to choose: Do we install Magento Open Source (as being maintained by Adobe) or Mage-OS (as being maintained by the community)? And already work is on the way to make installing Mage-OS worthwhile: Apart from a better documentation of dependencies, others have already worked on their first PR into Mage-OS, for instance improving indexing performance (thanks in advance, Ivan Chepurnyi).
Mage-OS Nederland
Another chapter on Mage-OS is without doubt Mage-OS Nederland, a new Dutch association to serve as a representation of the Dutch Magento community. We (I'm part of the board) took over the name Mage-OS because we needed a name, but also because we felt that Mage-OS as a name would be better to represent the community and also because we couldn't just name ourselves Magento Nederland because of copyright reasons.
Renaming Mage-OS to Magento?
So/me people are already go so far as that they propose to rename Magento to Mage-OS altogether. This is quite tricky. You might have spotted that I mentioned above the renaming of the composer vendor space from magento to mage-os. It doesn't mean that throughout the code the class prefix Magento is renamed to MageOS (or something). It would lead into dramatic code changes if that were to happen. The name Magento is simply integrated too much in too many places. This actually also shows the ridiculousness of Adobe its statement that Magento is now Adobe Commerce: If we talk about the code-level, the code will probably refer to Magento for a long time to go, regardless of whether the code is used in Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce or a Mage-OS distribution.
However, should we rename a Magento hackathon into a Mage-OS hackathon? Did the Mage in MageUnconference stand for Magento or Mage-OS? For newcomers, it can be quite confusing, especially because the name Mage-OS is not very wide-spread yet.
Mage-OS as part of the Yireo courseware
For quite some time, I have been making a living with Magento developer training. Installing Magento is part of that training and I have already added the option to do this from a Mage-OS mirror some time ago (skipping the Magento Marketplace). My aim is to convert more and more in my courseware from Magento to Mage-OS, once the practicalities allow so: For instance, once the distribution is out and the composer packages will be installable under the vendor name mage-os, this will in the Yireo courseware. By adding support for these technical features of Mage-OS, I'm hoping to support the overall project and educate people (my 50 cents).
Mage-OS as a Yireo strategy
Likewise, I'm keen to push the brand Mage-OS forward as well: At events, Mage-OS will be mentioned. Mage-OS is mentioned in blog posts like these. When explaining about the current state of Magento, I never leave out Mage-OS. And because I'm quite involved in the Dutch community, the name Mage-OS Nederland gives plenty of opportunity to talk more about Mage-OS as well. I'm in!
About the author
Jisse Reitsma is the founder of Yireo, extension developer, developer trainer and 3x Magento Master. His passion is for technology and open source. And he loves talking as well.
