I guess that the word is already spread. eBay Acquires Magento and Launches Open-Commerce Brand, X.Commerce. Since eBay and Magento have partnership for quite some time, I believe that this acquisition is not a huge surprise. Roy is happy. Yoav is happy. This seems to be a great thing for Magento Inc. I’ll ask a selfish question: “What does it mean to the companies like ours and what the hell is X.Commerce?”
The topic of this mail is to get some insight into X.Commerce. According to Magento’s official acquisition statement, we are finding out that eBay is building a global, open commerce platform that leverages the worldwide developer community. Alright, I don’t know what this means, but let’s continue.
Magento will be at the core of X.Commerce and they’ll be collaborating with their eBay colleagues on developing the X.Commerce platform and defining the next generation of eCommerce innovation. Further research tells us that eBay plans to operate Magento’s ecommerce platform separately while they look at additional ways to fully integrate Magento into eBay Inc.’s X.Commerce platform, following the closing. More details can be read at official FAQ.
I must say I have mixed feelings. From what I encountered, I don’t believe Magento and X.Commerce can coexist. It is too early to say what will this acquisition bring to our lives and whether the change will be positive or negative. It is for sure that something will change. As is said in Red Alert 1 intro: “Time will tell! Sooner or later, time will tell.” We love Magento and we love the team behind it. Some of us had a chance to meet some of them. At the time of this writing, one of the teams is in Ibiza on Magento Developers Paradise. We really hope that Magento’s wonderful story will not be lost and that eBay guys (especially Matthew Mengerink) have similar mindset. Judging the situation from other part of the world is quite difficult. Let’s hope for the best outcome.
Let’s now see what Roy and Yoav said about this event:
EDIT: Adding the video from John Donahoe, CEO, eBay Inc. which adds a few bits to the story:
What are your thoughts of this acquisition?
I’m still on the fence and will be watching this closely, I’m not a very big fan of eBay or Paypal’s methodologies and hope Magento doesn’t turn into some notch on eBay’s bed post, especially having a Wiki entry page dedicated to nothing but a “List of acquisitions”. Kind of Ironic to me the two guys that will be making the most out of these deal are the two mugs in the video
No offense, If I was in their seat I don’t think I would hesitate either. I also hope that the original core devs that left shortly after the first initial eBay investment are not too bitter if they were promised some kind of profit sharing only to have shares diluted with the investment. Here’s to another dot com bubble! 
Of course Roy and Yoav are happy, it’s payday!
Less cynically speaking we need to see where Magento truly plugs into eBay’s vision. Until we know what value magento provides eBay, we can’t really be too sure what the future holds.
Luckily, worst case, we fork Magento and try and do something ourselves.
As hitchhikers guide through the galaxy says: Do not panic!
Magento adds more than 100 Enterprise customers per month. If you do the calculations, you’ll see that Magento is extremely profitable for eBay, it’s one investment that payed off big time.
eBay would never endanger such a revenue stream. I’m sure Magento will continue to exist and even if X.Commerce takes its place it will simply be a matter of re-branding and renaming the platform.
I keep seeing X.Commerce and instantly think X-Cart.
@Aaron, a fork before the bloat and bureaucracy take over, sounds awesome to me!
One thing to note, nowhere in the announcement regarding eBay, Mage2, or X-Commerce is the phrase ‘open-source’. It’s merely ‘open ecommerce’.
I might be being a bit tragic, but that’s worrying to me.
I don’t want to say something about magento acquistion because “money talking”
But, ebay, what they want? They wanted to buy square but Jack Doersey didn’t accept. In my opinion, square is death birth project! Because, nobody need to use their credit card reader because gsm operators accepting payment via mobile phone
Of course, mobile line should be no pre-paid card.
EDIT, added eBay’s side of the story as told by the CEO John Donahoe in a short video that’s only been seen 47 times so far
I see that we need to publish a list for the people interested in X.Commerce Developers Paradise for October.
Great news, this will only make Magento stronger. I have confidence that Roy, Yoaf and the Magento team will stay focussed on making a great ecommerce engine.
Hey Guys –
Thanks to all for your comments and your interest in the future of Magento. Perhaps my favorite statement is in the original post: time will tell. But everything I’ve seen so far indicates that the future of Magento is incredibly bright, both as a standalone platform and as a strategic component of X.Commerce. Obviously X.Commerce is still in its early stages, and details about it aren’t yet available. But I can tell you that the vision for this group is exciting, global and open. And the team being assembled to make it a reality is truly world-class.
What’s equally exciting to us is eBay’s commitment to strengthening Magento’s existing business. Matthew Mengerink and several members of the X.Commerce team addressed our employees today, and blew us away with the passion for Magento and the desire to build on the success we’ve created to date. eBay believes in Magento and has challenged Yoav and me to make sure that the next chapter is even greater than what’s come before.
Thank you again for your comments – now it’s back to work to help shape the future of eCommerce!
Roy
I am worried.
Magento will vanish several years later when the x-commerce is finished because eBay will not run X.Commerce and Magento together.
Sorry folks, i think this is the start of the end for true free enterprise via Magento, i am already looking for another provider, if any of you are heavy ebay traders just look at the way ebay treats you, do you think they will change, they will just dictate how you run your store and what you sell, and from time to time shut you down, worth it?
Time we changed, this is the worse news i have heard today…. gutted.
It indicates the popularity of e-bay…
I have noticed for some time that finding information on the Magento website about their free “Community Edition” is becoming harder and harder to find. Whilst Magento’s Community Edition may be Open Source it’s quite clear that it’s on the back burner. With the acquisition of Magento by eBay I expect it to all but disappear. Varien obviously had their “exit strategy” all worked out and it paid off – big time!
What’s with all the hand waving in the videos? Some sort of psychology at play there
Global commerce platform… Is that actually something that is good? Sounds a bit like a monopoly to me.
Still i guess after we have all put in so much effort to learn the magento way, we will have little choice.
I guess we will have to wait and see how long Magentocommerce in its various forms exists, once x.commerce is ready.
Magento is dead. The product will go the eBay way. Period. Time to switch to other solutions.
Magento was always a commercial operation that flew in the face of true open source. Varien was always out to make money and happy to utilize the free resources of the open source community to both develop and promote it.
They’ve made their money now and Magento is in fact now dead.
You want true open source eCommerce? Then go back to osCommerce – the product Varien set out to kill after having fed off it for several years – it is the only honest open source solution out there.
Buying the competition has always been the best way to stay on top.
Tommorow, I will be poor, hungry and so on….
Just a quick update,
Matthew told me Roy and Yoav will still be leading Magento, so basically nothing changes. Roy told me he wants to develop Magento further and enter into a new chapter along with eBay and the community.
It has been told that X.Commerce will be open source on Magento Developers Paradise yesterday. Every fear for the future of Magento you have is pretty much irrational
By the way: i really dislike the name ‘X.Commerce’. It doesn’t sound good to me. I hope that Magento continues in developping, i really do.
I’m also believe that if Varien and eBay closes the open-source gate, another great e-commerce platform of other developpers will rise. But i’m 99% sure eBay will keep this community and open-source. In the end, we use their products and spread the word. If that’s go bad, then it’s bye bye Magento and X-commerce in worldly-terms.
A few things to point out:
1. Once a piece of software has been issued with an Open Source Licence that cannot be revoked. However, if Varien didn’t commit the resources in future to carry forward the Community Edition then who would? It took a full-time team of very high-level coders to develop it in the first place.
2. The anonymous comment about osCommerce is laughable.I see no coding in Magento which has anything to do with osCommerce and sincerely doubt that anyone on the osCommerce Team has the ability to understand the Magento coding – let alone write code to that level.
X commerce, from what I have gathered so far, is a cloud based ecomms platform, similar to magento go.
In which case, I don’t see how it could be open source as such? It’s not like they’ll have a packaged x.commerce distribution available for download, will they?
In IT nothing is forever, that is part of it’s charm. We need to understand, move forwards and seek the opportunities. The magento team has made a sound move here, if it wasn’t magento ebay would have gone with someone else. Better to be in the party than looking through the window.
Karen – your comment that nothing is forever in IT is sound. However, given the distrust of eBay shown here and elsewhere I think the general viewpoint is that they would have preferred eBay to gobble up some other company than Magento. Magento has only recently reached the point where it is slim and fast enough to be used on good quality shared hosting. Additionally a good number of people have taken a great deal of time and applied a lot of effort in becoming skilled in providing services based on Magento (and paid a good deal of money out if they are “Partners”). Given the distrust of eBay it’s only natural that people are worried.
Rhea, I understand people are worried, our business completely relies on Magento and obviously this could massively effect us too. We can only embrace and move on though, I don’t think any of us will be able to stop it. Maybe a fork of code could happen, but if you want to be where the market is you need to get your company in a position where you are able to stay aboard the train. That is what companies such as myself are trying to do I believe. I’ve been in Magento over 3 years, it’s been a bumpy ride, and I expect it will continue.
I agree with Karen,
In addition to that, just today we renewed our Magento Silver Parter status for 1 more year. I have faith this will turn out well.
I am not huge fan of open-source forks and I don’t think it is smart and sustainable way of moving forward. (I worked a lot with CRE Loaded between ’04 and ’08).
Anyway, after initial reaction of discomfort, we are now more calmer. Whatever happens, it will not be overnight. With this said, I feel that companies like WebShopApps and Inchoo will have healthy times to adopt if needed.
We live in hectic times where only thing that is eternal – is change.
[quote]Rhea, I understand people are worried, our business completely relies on Magento[/quote]
Actually Karen I’m just interested in how this pans out, being one of those distrustful of eBay. As far as business goes Magento is a very minor part of our business – which is purely web hosting. We dropped Design and Development last year so we could concentrate solely on hosting.
Do the video with Yoav and Roy is a joke ? How can you trust someone who has now 0% in a compagnie about the future !
That’s really funny what’s happened with Magento :
1. The amazing great Powerful Community Edition
2. Magento EE and PE (Commercial)
3. Magento GO (Commercial)
4. Got Money and Bye Bye
So strange between what we think and the reality. They are “guru” They sell to eBay Magento and the big community too. We are now employed by eBay. We can work for free. That’ s eBay way of business since many years.
Who is the worst Magento Inc or eBay. The good news is Paypal will working better, than now !
For sure Magento was the best e commerce solution, for them.
Remember that Paypal powers a great deal of Magento installations. Paypal is an eBay company, and they won’t want to lose the 3.9% on all those purchases on over a million sites selling billions of dollars a year. That would be stupid. Magento in one form or another will stay.
eBay has been planning this for a long time with the launch of Magento Go. It’s the cloud based, software as a service offering, Magento Go, that will become part of x.commerce. This has likely been the plan all along since eBay purchased the first 49% in 2010.
Magento Enterprise edition will live on for it’s revenue stream and high profile client brand recognition. Magento Community edition will live on for it’s free development, debugging, documentation, etc.. by the community.
It’s great to hear from Roy that Magento will continue to be developed as both a standalone platform and as a strategic component of X.Commerce. As a small ecommerce site owner I look forward to Magento Community editions continued development.
I think this is the beginning of the end also. Looking forward to Magento forks soon.
“Looking forward to Magento forks soon”
Don’t hold your breath whilst waiting. The people with the ability to provide and maintain forks of Magento are few and far between.
For those of you looking for an open source alternative, might I suggest Spree Commerce? Its based on Ruby but that just means its more flexible and easier to maintain.
Spree is also 100% open source – there is no enterprise/commercial edition and it will stay open source forever.
There’s a few hosting companies that either specialize in it, such as ourselves, or others that have made their primary business hosting it.
One or all of us have the resources and the motivation to maintain a fork.
@MageMojo,
Forking it would require much more than just hosting it. Magento as a company invested enormous amount of time and resources in research and development, marketing and support. I don’t see anyone in the community ready to fork it. BTW. I don’t see the reason to fork it. Magento will continue to operate just as it did so far, it only changed the name of the owner, nothing else.
Successful OS projects almost always require the support of a commercial entity. If the commercial entity loses interest then the project will eventually wither and die.
I agree that its difficult to fork a project as large and complex as Magento. If Magento is to survive as an OS project, eBay will need to stay committed to supporting it (and that’s certainly a possibility.)
There is an outside chance that Magento developers will band together to keep it going but I wouldn’t bet on that outcome. As someone who runs an alternative OS e-commerce project I can tell you its not a simple task.
You have to check the releases archives of the C.E edition to understand, that a sleepy period is coming. Now if you compare with Magento GO, many add-ons have been added since fews days. Magento GO is a good product to start up, I think the “next generation of e commerce by Magento” is a product like that + EE and PE, more than the open source edition. I also spent 3 years to understand Magento, and lot of money too, so I’ m very disapointed, and I still don’ t understand why they tell eBay acquire Magento, and no more information. You only can get confused
As they say, Prepare for the worst, Expect the best, Forget what others think and do your own thing.
@Toni,
We have no plans to start a fork and hopefully it does continue to operate at least close to it’s current format. Better testing and debugging would be nice
But should it change format in a way that negatively alters it, well then that’s where someone like us comes in. Sure it requires more than hosting it. And we provide much more than just hosting it. We have a talented team of staff members who are high level programmers who really go the extra mile to help our customers solve issues with their stores.
I don’t think for second that we’d be the sole operators the way Varien is/was. We would certainly be one of the main contributors who contributes much more programming time than just nights and weekends though.
122M from ebay and their employee and community get how much of this? … Not a dime. As far as I’m concerned Roy is a crook. Not only did he steal all the hard work from the development community he basically left his employees high and dry. Damn right I’d sue if I worked for Magento..
Oh and a fork is not that hard if you have the community working behind it.
I’m no fan of eBay, as I’ve made clear, but the last post was well out of order. I fail to see why “the community” SHOULD get “a dime” from the sale. It was Varien that developed Magento and brought it to market and not any amorphous “community”. As for the team at Varien I’m as sure as I can be that one of the terms of their employment would have been Stock Options, and so they would have done well out of the sale.
As for anyone suing anyone else over the sale the poster needs a reality check. A commercial company developed a product and sold it – normal practice. I don’t like who they sold it to, but that’s an entirely separate matter in which I have no input.
Finally, with relation to ‘forking’ Magento, I stand by what I said earlier – I doubt that there is a cohesive enough and skilled enough team of coders to be able to do that and to maintain their own fork independent of work done by Varien on Magento.
I agree with Toni here.
Not too much will change. It’s very much an Oracle – MySQL situation. Some people care, others don’t. There is always the risk that Magento ends up squished by eBay but that’s a risk which exist today for every product you depend on.
Losing the community edition would even be acceptable. Varien doesn’t owe anyone anything there. Magento is the typical “free as in beer, not as in speech”, opensource product.
@Rhea “cohesive and skilled enough team of coders” .. please. E-commerce is not a particularly hard problem to solve.
Forking magento might be hard because of it’s sheer size and lack of test culture; not because of lack of skilled programmers. Varien is first and upmost throwing _lots_ of programmers at Magento.
Magento is only incidentally complex. I don’t see why a fork could not be successful. Building sustainable business on top of such, is what is hard. Then again, nothing different from what exists today
@Jeffry Degrande: “please. E-commerce is not a particularly hard problem to solve.”
No it’s not – until you throw in a custom made framework, the Zend engine, and OOP, then it rises above the mundane. There are many programmers out there who can handle the mundane but who would go cross-eyed and have a feinting fit if asked to code a new module for Magento. And that’s without trying to put together a team of committed professionals, willing to give their all, to maintain a fork of the project.
I think that they are telling the truth and Magento will coexist and I wish to believe that x commerce is going to be just a simpler and faster magento version and that this bad name is just a beta working title.
It’s time to move on. With the recent buyout and magento potentially exiting the market, there are going to be some hige shoes to fill. Forking Magento isn’t a solution. There is still a huge need for a stable, medium size solution that does require a development firm or a computer science degree. Who’s going to step up?
From outward appearances, essentially eBay is co-opting Magento’s strategy and making their own.
There are a lot of people out there wondering how this eBay story will end.
The brand itself is still fundamentally an “off-price merchandise” brand. They need X.Commerce to be an “eCommerce building blocks/ecosystem” brand.
The Magento brand IMO will still be around, just a little more muted.
My biggest question is that right now Magento Enterprise is a big deal in Magento’s strategy. However, eBay bought GSI for the “Enterprise” brand. I think Magento Enterprise “the brand” will likely diminish. The product itself may just become known as “Magento”. Who knows?
After all, Varien is following the well-worn RedHat strategy of making money off open-source. As part of eBay, they can afford to have more reach and not charge as much.
Interesting times…
@Nedim Sabic:
I think X.Commerce is not a working title at all. However, its existence does not mean Magento goes away. X.Commerce becomes the “framework/ecosystem”, and Magento’s ecommerce platform becomes one pillar of it.
eBay seems to want X.Commerce to become the common framework for multichannel development. But more like Apache (sets of options that can interconnect), and less like a Java (one framework to rule them all).
@Rick Watson
On the partner meeting they shared their idea of how that thing will work, basically, eBay is the lowest level of the pyramid serving really small businesses and individuals. Magento Community edition wold be one step above that, Professional and Enterprise should serve large businesses, while GSI is used by giants.