Magento Association & Mage-OS collaboration plans

The Mage-OS Association and the Magento Association serve the interests of the broader Magento community. We understand the confusion surrounding the existence of two associations, with questions such as "Why are there two?", "What are the differences?", "Which one should I support?" being the most common.

To clarify, Adobe backs the Magento Association, which owns the right to use the Magento brand. In contrast, Mage-OS is an independent initiative uniting enthusiastic members of the Magento Community who want to contribute to Magento in a different way. Mathias Schreiber (Executive Director of Magento Association) and Vinai Kopp (President of Mage-OS Association) sat together to explore how we can synergize our approaches to better serve the entire Magento Community and Ecosystem.

We will not cover the history that no one can change but will instead focus on the current situation and future plans that we all can be a part of.

These are the first few areas in which we want to collaborate - and we are working towards having more in the future.

David Lambauer initiated the developer documentation project, inspiring us to launch a collaborative effort for improved merchant documentation. We aim to facilitate the installation, configuration, and use of Magento 2 stores for merchants.

Our strategy involves utilizing AI, a field familiar to David, to initiate the content. Subsequently, we will manually revise, enhance, and sustain the documentation. The merchant documentation will reside on a new domain, providing an option to switch between Magento Open Source and Mage-OS for the screenshots.

Adobe has tasked the Magento Association with creating a Community Council to enhance the community's impact on Magento Open Source development. Council members will manage upvoted merge requests and collaborate with community maintainers to incorporate them.

As Mage-OS integrates all changes from Magento Open Source, this presents a valuable opportunity for Mage-OS to contribute upstream, and vice versa in the future. We actively encourage contributors from the Mage-OS community to participate in the Community Council.

We want to address a valid point of criticism regarding merges in repositories other than magento/magento2 not being processed. This occurs because Adobe aims to establish and refine the process and workflow in the main repository first before extending it to other repositories. From a corporate perspective, this approach is sensible, considering that altering processes in a large enterprise is challenging and time-consuming.

We also discussed additional areas of cooperation during our discussion, including joint community polls and memberships, with a focus on mid- to long-term collaboration. We encourage you to share your ideas and reach out to us on Discord or meet with us at upcoming 2024 Magento events.

On December 11, both Mathias and Vinai will be at the Christmage Meetup organized by Integer-net in Aachen, Germany. If you are in the vicinity, please join us in person. If not, send us your questions and comments beforehand to discuss them at the event.

To contact us, join the Mage-OS Discord server or send an email to Mathias Schreiber.