eBay will acquire Magento
Tuesday, 07 June 2011
Big news yesterday: Announced simultaneously on the eBay site as well as in the Magento blog: Magento will be part of eBay. This should not come as a surprise, because eBay bought a stake into Magento already earlier in 2010. But what will happen to the Magento project?
What will happen with the Magento project?
Ofcourse it's far too early to say anything, but coming from the Joomla! community which includes various open-source zealots, we can easily understand that this move is going to be seen by some people as the downfall of Magento. We don't share that opinion. Magento has become a major player in the open-source community and dropping that name is straight-out money.
The founders of Magento are straight-forward in their goal for making money, but that does not include a strategy of abusing open source as a principle - they will continue to work on the Magento project, and so does eBay. Actually, of all the evil corporations in the world, eBay is certainly not the most evil - with their open atitude towards sub-brands and open source.
eBay and X.Commerce
eBay has started a project called X.Commerce which is supposed to bind various commerce-aspects together - not only offering a solution for merchants (like Magento does), but to buyers and even vendors as well. Magento will be at the core of this technology, while PayPal - part of eBay since some time - will be play a big role in the payment ecosystem.
As Magento and eBay both state, this will certainly not be the end of Magento - but exciting and shocking it certainly is.