eBay Buys Magento – Open Source Edition Future Uncertain
Monday 06/06/2011 – eBay have today announced they are purchasing the remaining 51% stake in Magento Inc. the company behind the open source eCommerce platform Magento.
The full announcement is available to read here and states that Magento will join X.Commerce, eBay’s newly created integrated open source platform group, this hopefully suggests that Magento will continue to be available free of charge as a Community Edition, as well as their commercial editions.
A statement on the Magento blog echoes the comments of eBay suggesting that the product will form the core of the eBay X.Commerce product so it will be interesting to see what this provides, I would guess at a streamlined version of Magento which is more lightweight, one of the major flaws with Magento currently is the bloat in my opinion.
Magento have also provided a FAQ in PDF format with some further info on this merger, exciting times for Magento but whether it will continue as a free standalone product or be completely absorbed into a separate eBay product remains to be seen.