MageBridge is free
Saturday, 13 November 2010While in the Magento world it's quite common to pay over hundreds of Euros for a single extension, within the Joomla! community often commercial extensions are frowned upon. Because MageBridge costs a hefty 200 Euro, a common sidenote to MageBridge that is too expensive, so it's best to skip it.
Too expensive?
But once you have decided to use Magento as webshop, you will have a good laugh when you discover MageBridge. MageBridge requires ofcourse some extra effort to get used to, but various administrative actions that require a lot of time with Magento are actually dealt with very easily using MageBridge:
Setting up a multi-site multi-lingual configuration is peanuts in MageBridge, for every Menu-Item that you create in MageBridge you save minutes (even if you're a programmer) and the CMS part - well, let's not talk about the CMS part of Magento (because Joomla! is even far more superior than the Magento Enterprise CMS+ funtionality).
So MageBridge is not expensive, unless you are making no money with your shop (but then again: why bother building a shop, when it is not profitable?).
Even better: MageBridge is free!
Even better - and that's not something too many people know about - MageBridge is actually free. Referring to the famous quote of guru Richard Stallman, the word free can be interpreted two ways: Either as in free beer (meaning there is no charge involved) and as in free speech (as in the source code can be modified freely, freeing you from any restraining copyright issues).
First of all, MageBridge is free as in free speech. All code is released either under the GNU/GPL (for the Joomla! part) or a custom Yireo EULA (which is an open source license compliant with the Magento part). But, second of all, MageBridge is also free as in free beer: You can login into our SVN server and download all the source code if you want.
Getting the source code is only part of getting MageBridge up and running: We only offer wrapped-up package (ready for installation in either Joomla! and Magento) to paying customers. It's one of the services customers actually pay for: Release management, updates, support, etcetera. However, if somebody wants to step up and create free packages - please go ahead: It's open source.