Latest / Talk Commerce / Magento Maverick: Jisse Reitsma's Bold Vision for Open Source E-commerce

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Magento Maverick: Jisse Reitsma's Bold Vision for Open Source E-commerce · Talk Commerce

• Brent Peterson (00:02.158) Welcome to this special community edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Jesse. Jesse Rietsma from calling in fresh from the Netherlands. Jesse, please tell us, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day -to -day role. Yirio is your company. Tell us one of your passions in life. Jisse Reitsma (00:25.918) So you told me that the first thing that we're going to do is that you tell a joke. Is this the joke? Okay. Sorry. Thank you, Brint. Yeah, so my name is Jesse Reidsma from the Netherlands and I own a little company, Yereo. And for some time I've been developing extensions also with Yereo, but I have to admit that it's a little bit on a... Brent Peterson (00:30.35) No, that comes after your introduction. No, this is not the joke yet. Jisse Reitsma (00:52.638) on a lower pace. But I started to do trainings already way back in, well, with Magenta 1 even. And then I started to do the same thing with Magenta 2 and I'm still doing that. Thanks to Hufa and Maid's West and all of the fresh evolvements. But yeah, doing my thing. Brent Peterson (01:12.782) Good. And you are going to tell us a passion that you have in life. Jisse Reitsma (01:18.448) Well, in preparation of this, we talked about my family. And I have to admit that I became dad two and a half months ago of a fresh born son called Abel. So that's the biblical name. I'm not sure how you pronounce that in English. Abel, yeah. So we're not that biblical, but it's just a beautiful name on its own. Brent Peterson (01:36.238) Able? Yeah. Jisse Reitsma (01:43.838) And since then, well, yeah, family's back on the agenda. And I really love my daughter Sophie and son Abel and of course my wife Susan, who's not your Susan by the way, but yeah. Everybody needs a Susan. Brent Peterson (01:56.91) Yeah, I have my own, Susan. Everybody needs a Susan. There you go. So, Apple and Able. Apple. I like actually Apple sounds better. Yeah. tell me your daughter's name again. I'm sorry. Sophie. Yes. that's great. and then that is a very good passion and, and, very well said. Thank you. Jisse Reitsma (02:11.742) Abel. Yeah. Jisse Reitsma (02:16.51) Sophie. Yeah. Brent Peterson (02:25.07) All right, so before we do get started, and I would like to talk a little bit about the Magenta community and MageOS, and I've had a realization or come to whatever. Jisse Reitsma (02:33.882) Epiphany. Brent Peterson (02:35.694) Epiphany, yes. Yeah, good. But let me do the joke and we'll get that out of the way and then we'll start talking. Here we go. So all you have to do is react to the joke because I know that you put on this great conference called Reacticon and I knew I haven't been at the conference but I thought the conference was all about you just doing different hand gestures and see how people react to them, right? Is that correct? Jisse Reitsma (02:39.134) Thank you. Brent Peterson (02:56.846) This is not the joke yet. No, no, no, I'm just, I'm trying to get an idea of what your conference is about. No, it's not. So the conference is only about how people react to different hand gestures that you do, because you were doing this earlier. Jisse Reitsma (02:57.198) is this a joke? sorry. No. Okay. It's so hard. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Jisse Reitsma (03:10.238) Yeah, and then actually the conference is really about seeing the reaction on their faces. Yeah. Yeah. Brent Peterson (03:14.926) Yeah, yeah, yeah, good. Okay, so I got it right. Here we go. So I'm gonna tell you a joke. Here we go. My kids put together a PowerPoint presentation explaining why we should go to the water park. It had several slides. Jisse Reitsma (03:30.366) Nice. Okay. Well, nice joke. is my sound off? Or did you turn off? Okay. I liked the joke. Thank you. Brent Peterson (03:33.422) Anything? Anything? Nothing. Brent Peterson (03:41.134) No, I hear you. Yeah. I replaced my rooster with a duck. Now I wake up at the quack of dawn. Jisse Reitsma (03:51.87) Okay. No, please. Please stop. Yeah. But I love these little jokes. But I have to admit that I don't know those jokes anymore that I didn't get. But in the past, you told me a couple of times those jokes that really require you to know the proper English words and all of their double meaning or whatever, then it's getting a little bit harder. But... Brent Peterson (03:53.486) Is that any better? Should we stop? Please stop. Brent Peterson (04:19.918) Because I know you I'll tell you one more and I tripped over my wife's bra. It was a booby trap. Jisse Reitsma (04:20.606) I get the quacks and the slides and... And. Jisse Reitsma (04:31.646) Okay. The stupid thing is, if I want to translate this to Dutch, I can't. It's just... Brent Peterson (04:41.166) Yeah, well, maybe I'll try. I'll use AI to do that. All right, so we're in a green room. We kind of prepped it with the state of the Magento community. I've been very prolific, if I could say. There hasn't been a lot of people writing about the Magento community. There hasn't been a lot of... Jisse Reitsma (04:47.614) Do do do do do. Brent Peterson (05:08.878) anything happening except for meat magentos. And I think one thing is that, but I will say that there has been a resurgence of the magenta community, especially in Europe, around the hoof a theme that has brought a lot of energy back into things. And I think one thing that I've had that I've experienced is a different outlook of how it feels here in the US compared to how it. Jisse Reitsma (05:11.678) Yeah. Brent Peterson (05:36.27) how I'm sure it feels in Europe. So I wanted to get your kind of take on that. And then the second part of what I would like to speak to later on is Majo S and how that is going to help energize Magento open source. But I do want to get your perspective on the Magento community and how you feel it is right now. Jisse Reitsma (05:56.062) Yeah, well, I personally have to admit that. So in my personal life, a couple of things happened. I became dead and now of a second and before that COVID happened. And since COVID, we actually didn't meet in person anymore. So I think the last time that we met in person was in. In Austin at Maid's Titans, Austin's that you organized. And I think that's exactly maybe the same for some more people. Definitely also when the Adobe Takeover kicked in. So still a couple of Dutchies, they went over to the US to attend the Adobe Summit and et cetera. But I think a large portion just said, well, let's focus maybe on Europe first to see what happens now in Europe. And besides that, a lot of people just stopped traveling altogether. So yeah, I think since COVID, but also since the merger basically just came up more and more, the ecosystem might've been split a little bit between Europe and the US again. But that's kind of like normal, I think. We're not yet in a world where everything is just totally. Brent Peterson (07:12.494) Yeah, again, I think. Jisse Reitsma (07:24.19) totally global and traveling across the ocean is hard and etc. So it's basically explaining why there could be differences. But I think you're more focused upon, of course, what those differences are exactly. Well, and I think one thing that is really, really different between Europe and the US is that whenever... Adobe comes up with their own strategy and they say, e -commerce is the best and et cetera, then in the US there's still a lot of potential, a lot of clients out there that are large enough to actually go along with that story as well. However, then if you compare things with, for instance, the Netherlands, then in the Netherlands, there's just far too few. web shops that are capable of paying the licenses of the Adobe experience cloud and therefore Adobe commerce itself as well. And therefore I think the percentage for some reason in the Netherlands definitely for magenta open source is much larger than that percentage that Adobe commerce takes in. And adding to that, that the Adobe story also needs to try to travel across that ocean in the other way, just that the Dutchies went to Adobe Summit. The message of Adobe is not European, is not our message. So immediately we label that, well, that's the large company that is almost at the other point of the world. And should we believe that or not? Well, I think actually progressively when the merger happened and when the Magento open source roadmap stalled and other claims were made, let me just put this polite, that belief of separation just became larger. And well, at that moment, everyone needed to choose, are we going to go the Adobe way or are we going to go a different way? Jisse Reitsma (09:37.79) And I think we were also going to mention the word or the name shopware because that's also one thing that happened. A lot of Magento agencies in Europe also switched to shopware as an alternative because they couldn't go along with the Adobe Commerce story, at least for their own clients. So I think that happened definitely also. That's maybe explaining also part of the difference between what is happening in the US and what happened in Europe. That with, in the US, it's kind of like logical maybe to follow along with a huge brand name like Adobe because it's also how the US becomes larger. Like the US is making everything a big, big iconic thing. And therefore to follow an icon like Adobe kind of like makes sense. And if you can't follow along, then you can always go to Shopify, which is Shopify also a US brand, by the way? I think so. yeah, yeah. But in Europe, we're more skeptical towards those US brands saying like, but this is the new way of doing it with it. And that skepticism also led, I think, actually to the current split in the ecosystem on itself. Brent Peterson (10:40.174) I think it's Canadian. Jisse Reitsma (11:03.102) I'm not saying that Europe is responsible for the whole split. It's more that it's explaining maybe the different attitudes in things. Brent Peterson (11:14.478) Yeah, I want to dig into what you said a little earlier about Adobe's message is not the European message. And I think that we all recognize that Adobe has gone upstream with the messaging around Magento, around Adobe Commerce, and that there is no messaging anymore for medium -sized businesses. It's all about enterprise businesses. Jisse Reitsma (11:23.326) Yeah. Jisse Reitsma (11:34.686) Hmm. Jisse Reitsma (11:42.494) No, yeah, and that's it for the practical part, of course. Like if you need to pick a Magento -like product for a customer that is not able to afford the license of Adobe Commerce, then well, you need to choose Magento Open Source. And if there's no roadmap for Magento Open Source anymore, then what? No, but I think it's more also that what I was referring to is more that at Adobe Summit, a lot of the announcements for Adobe commerce were made with a lot of sharing and a lot of applause. And always those those applause and those those hearings. It's more of an American thing to to actually cheer along with everything as well. While the Europeans are just sitting on their chair, looking like, well, I don't trust this. And that that difference in attitude is maybe also explaining why. people in the Netherlands or people in Europe didn't want to just sit down and wait until Adobe came with something different. But they just said, well, if Adobe is not doing the thing that we want Adobe to do, then theoretically we need to do it ourselves. And that's, I think, how the Made to US movement was born in the first place. And we didn't really mention Made to US yet, but now we need to do that, I think. Brent Peterson (13:07.63) Yeah, no, I think that when that letter came out a couple of years ago, I was sort of opposed to it and I thought that this was not a good thing for the community. But I will say now that I've taken a 180 degree review on this and I feel as it's the only thing that we need now, especially what you said, we've heard Adobe. Jisse Reitsma (13:19.038) No. Brent Peterson (13:36.462) say it over and over again that they're committed to Magento. However, we've also seen now that there's no more features ever going to be put into Magento. There's no version of Magento coming out. So Magento has turned into really just this plug -in to Experience Manager that is slowly getting eaten up by SaaS microservices or... I mean, now that I saw there's Adobe catalog, right? Which can replace your Magento catalog. So there's going to be little pieces that I feel that are going to start picking away at what Magento is. And of course, none of us know what the actual roadmap is that is the underpinning of whatever Adobe commerce is. But I don't feel, I feel like Magento was a bridge to keep Adobe in the game. Jisse Reitsma (14:02.334) Yeah. Brent Peterson (14:29.198) and it's going to keep them in the game until their new product comes out, which will be some kind of a SaaS product that replaces Magento. Jisse Reitsma (14:36.126) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the difficulty was at the moment when actually Adobe came out with that news or Magento came out with that news that the two merged, there were always two reasons. One was Adobe simply needed to have a commerce product to add to their experience cloud. Well, that's still totally true as well. So that's where we see the roadmap evolving and all of the additional products. being added and et cetera. But the second part was that they also chose Magento for its community. And that's still kind of like the tricky part because if you buy a community, then first of all, a lot of people are opposed to that as well because you can't buy community. You can only buy the people that are actually buying licenses, but everyone who's contributing or just the freeloaders that are just using everything for free. You can't just earn money from it. So there always has been an expectation. Sooner or later, we're going to see how Adobe is going to profit from that community somehow. And I always thought, OK, but that's going to be what is it called? The Adobe stock integration so that people are just simply going into their Magento admin and buy all of the stock images there. And suddenly they're making a huge money out of that. Well, I'm not saying that it's going to be huge, but at least some income. I'm not sure if that's paying off any revenue at this moment, but I don't think it's a large percentage. Or integrating Illustrator or Photoshop into the Magento Admin Panel or weird stuff like that. But there has been little movement there. The only movement was basically on the commerce part, on the integration with the experience cloud. So I think that that second reason is still doubtful, whether it's actually true. Brent Peterson (16:43.502) Yeah, we still have Adobe. I mean, the one thing they launched is Adobe Payments. That is a plugin and you can use it in open source. I think the one thing that the community has complained a lot about is the fact that a lot of these things that they've produced are only for Adobe Commerce. Like Sensei would be a great example of. Jisse Reitsma (16:49.022) Yeah. Yeah. Brent Peterson (17:08.91) of intelligent, artificial intelligence or machine learning that could be bolted into Magento. And what a great way to get a Magento open source person to pay for an Adobe license, then allow them to use Adobe Sensei and have licensing costs involved or even on demand costs, just like ChatGPT does now. So I think that, I think you're right. There's a lot of missed opportunities and I disagree that Adobe's in it for the community anymore. I don't think that they see the community as an asset at all. I think they see it as sort of an annoying little bug that keeps buzzing around their head and every once in a while they have to kind of swat it away. Jisse Reitsma (17:58.014) Well, there's still this other potential as well. That's basically just the open source part. That if Adobe Commerce itself is add -on, well, is currently just add -on features on top of Magento open source, plus of course the rest of the experience cloud added to that. And that addition is actually the largest part of all. But there's B2B modules. There's all of these add -on modules. And as long as those modules are there and the commerce customers are needing for it, then actually there needs to be a core that also facilitates those modules as well, because without the core, then those modules could not exist anymore. And as long as that's there, and as long as those modules and those customers that are paying for those modules are earning revenue for Adobe, then they need to have that core vital as well. So, In that reasoning, I personally think that they do want the community to pick up upon the development of that core altogether. But that's where the confusion actually starts. So if they really wanted to make sure that the community is responsible for the core, then they should have given that community much more autonomacy or... Brent Peterson (19:23.342) Yeah, like giving a little bit more, just a say in what happens, yeah. Jisse Reitsma (19:23.902) Yeah, I don't know. self -governance or yeah, no. So, and that's where actually a couple of the attempts with the Magento Association ended up in a failure. So there was too much talk, but not letting go. And sometimes you need to let go to let something else grow that is not in your own hands, but in somebody else's hands. So if you keep... parenting, so that's something I need to learn on a personal level sooner or later. If you're doing too much parenting, then actually that freedom never evolves into something more beautiful. And that's, I think, where we need to ask ourselves whether Adobe is actually experienced in open source at all. So they did have always a couple of open source projects, but I personally believe that this is the first endeavor where they really trying to make sure that the community is actually responsible for maintaining instead of just a couple of engineers. But that experiment so far is not going too well. However, yeah, that brings us maybe towards MejooS and that started off with a letter and then a bigger project. And I talked recently also with Vinay Kopp in preparation of another presentation. Brent Peterson (20:31.534) Yeah. Jisse Reitsma (20:46.622) And then I asked him, like, could you explain a little bit what the current position would be of Mates OS versus Adobe versus the Magento Association? And he explained that it's currently poking the bear. So there's this huge giant and Mates OS has a little stick that picking at the bear or poking at the bear and trying at the... I don't know, at the belly and seeing like, hey, does this hurt? Then let's try to propose a license change. Does it hurt there? And slowly, they're trying to find out what the real expectations are, but also the real plans are of Adobe. Because currently, there's not enough transparency to simply tell from whatever Adobe's telling. So there's a lot of confusion still. And I think actually that made us... The further they drive up the conflict, is that an expression? Brent Peterson (21:48.27) Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I started out by saying I've had this, this new realization, this epiphany that major OS now is very important. And I think what's going to have to happen is, is that major OS needs to have a version that is, that has a new feature in it and people can use. And just like shopware has come out with all these AI features and they came out with them very quickly. They were in their core right away. Jisse Reitsma (22:07.998) Mm -hmm. Jisse Reitsma (22:14.846) Yeah. Yeah. Brent Peterson (22:18.254) And even in their open source version had some AI features in it that Magento has to do or a major OS has to do the same. Cause I think that the biggest thing that now people are going to miss out on in Adobe commerce is the fact that there is no built in AI in anything. And they're, they're going to get slowly left behind and, and without any vision from leadership. Jisse Reitsma (22:23.774) Yeah. Brent Peterson (22:45.582) They're leaving it up to the community to there's extensions on the marketplace, but nobody, you know, I think people still, I think the perception of marketplace with vendors is that it is something more towards the community and less towards enterprise, you know, like, so, Jisse Reitsma (23:01.63) Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, and maybe to bring back before we dive into maybe other specific things of MateOS and Hufa, of course, as well. We started talking about the difference between Europe and the US. And that's maybe also where that letter that was written by MateOS or back then it was not called MateOS, but I don't know what it was called anymore, but it had a different name. Mosca or something or yeah, no. But what struck me and I found it cool at that moment as well was that maybe 20 people signed that listing or that letter. And of those 20, I could count four of those people as my personal friends and some other people that I closely worked together with. And all of them were buddies. Brent Peterson (23:33.934) Yeah, I can't remember the name right now. Jisse Reitsma (24:01.502) But that's already actually an issue on its own that there's a group of people that are so tight that they can trust each other. But if you're looking at it from a distance, then you can see all of those people work together. Even worse, I believe that in that listing of 20 people, there were only three of them outside of Europe. I'm not sure if that's totally true, but I got that impression. And from that moment onwards, then you have that separation between... Brent Peterson (24:20.814) Yeah, yeah. Jisse Reitsma (24:28.638) Adobe, a huge giant in the US and that sees a letter from a group of people that always wear T -shirts and et cetera and are not founders of large enterprise companies and they write a letter, come on. And of course, therefore the logical step was to actually bring it up to the moment that we are at this very moment that that Made to S is actually delivering something. for real, because that's the only way to prove that actually whatever the people were threatening with, coming out with a distribution on its own, which is better than Magento open source. The only way to prove that to a huge giant like Adobe is actually to do it. And of course, the pity would be that if currently the plug would be pulled because Adobe says, okay, Brent Peterson (25:15.95) Yeah. Jisse Reitsma (25:27.614) you have your way and here's the copyright of Magento and take everything over. The pity would almost be that all of the efforts in Made .OS would be for nothing. But I think actually that that's not true because the effort is to create scripts to allow for the open source distribution of Made .OS, the porting mechanism, different composer labels. A lot of that work. could be thrown away if the conflict would be solved. But still, all of that work was basically putting together all of those people that were involved to practically work together towards something. And all of that effort would simply flow into, well, the thing that ideally we called Magento Obersource. But yeah, so I think, yeah, it's all for the good. It's only that we're still at... Brent Peterson (26:15.118) Yeah. Jisse Reitsma (26:23.902) at crossroads where we don't necessarily know is this going to be a complete split or is this going to be in the end working out in favor of all of the parties, working together again. But yeah. Brent Peterson (26:39.15) Yeah, I want to go back to that. Like I want to rewind to the part where we talked about the differences between the U S and the enterprise culture in the U S for Adobe commerce and magenta in the past and the way it is in Europe. I think one of the things that there has been an embracing of magenta is with the developer community in Europe. And it's much, it's much more robust compared to the U S where the interest was more in the, in the agency space and thus the commercial space. Jisse Reitsma (27:06.686) Mm -hmm. Yeah. Brent Peterson (27:09.358) And my experience around organizing Magento events is that in, especially in the United States, it's been difficult to get people to attend other than agencies who want to get an ROI out of the event. And I think that that is, that little bit is a very, is an underpinning of why the, why the Magento community isn't as robust in the U S and never has been compared to Europe. Jisse Reitsma (27:36.254) Yeah. Yeah, but it's difficult one. So the meaning of open source on itself is a cultural thing. So in the Netherlands, the meaning of open source is, hey, it's open source. So if you put something for free and you contribute to it, then somehow you get better of it. And because you get better of it, well, that's the Dutch commerce mentality, then you should do it because it's a commercial good thing. And that's already conflicting with the German attitude towards open source, which is much more, no, we do this for nonprofits and then there's profits, but there's a fine line in between and you should never, never, never, ever cross that line. Which is again, different from the French attitude, which I don't know because I don't understand it, but that's already within Europe. Brent Peterson (28:30.638) Yeah, the French, yeah, they just like, let's have a glass of wine. And we'll talk about it tonight. Jisse Reitsma (28:35.71) Well, the meaning of open source is like, well, let's have a glass of wine. That's it. Brent Peterson (28:41.038) Yeah, and we'll talk about it later. And then tomorrow we'll talk about the meaning again, but let's make sure we prioritize our wine. Jisse Reitsma (28:46.974) Yeah. Yeah. And I have to admit that that per region in the world, per country, this is different. And that's for a lot of different reasons. So for instance, in India, I personally see that open source has much more meaning that is for free. And therefore, you can simply benefit from it. While in Europe, it's a lot about contributing back because otherwise it doesn't work. And then in the US, It's something that you need to fund because otherwise it's not working. And in the end, I think that's totally okay, but it's explaining why in Europe a letter was written and it was not necessarily in Europe, but it's that the largest portion of all of those Chinese was actually based in Europe. And then on top of it, Meizhu Esq. is currently a foundation that is based in Poland. So it's explaining why it's based there because the advocating that open source should remain open source is much stronger in Europe somehow. And I think that's just touching upon a lot of reasons, but also one of the things that it's explaining why people in Europe have been watching the movement of Adobe with skepticism altogether. Well, in the US it's maybe more like, hey, but if another large enterprise takes over an open source community, it's only for the good because then more funding is available. Yeah, but that's more the outcome because if you look at it, Microsoft is a US -based company as well, and they did it in the right way. So it's really depending upon who's doing what at this moment, what the outcome was. Brent Peterson (30:22.446) Yeah, that's exactly the opposite of this happened. Jisse Reitsma (30:41.598) but it's at least explaining also why there's a difference between the US and Europe. Which always brings up for me also a more difficult point, which is we also started to mention briefly, HuFa, and as I personally see it, and I think you're on that same page as well, is that if you're talking about the current revival of Magento, then it's not related to Adobe commerce that much, but much more on made to S, but also Hufa and theoretically a couple of other smaller involvements in there. Well, and already the fact that Hufa is written with a couple of dots on the A is confusing. That's a harder part. It makes it more European thing. And the fact then also that, is that true? Brent Peterson (31:26.35) Yeah. Jisse Reitsma (31:34.91) all of the employees at Hufa currently are Europe based as well, I think so. But yeah, so it makes it kind of like a European thing. And in the Netherlands, that's maybe nice to comment upon, I really get the feeling that almost all of the Dutch agencies that are doing Magento are currently shifting over towards Hufa. So it's that important already. Brent Peterson (31:40.782) Yes, that's true. Jisse Reitsma (32:01.982) But I don't know about the US. I personally believe that in the US, there's a larger portion in the US of magenta agencies that are actually going all the way towards PWA Studio and the headless approach. I'm not sure. No? Brent Peterson (32:14.382) Yeah, I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean, maybe it would be completely custom. I don't, I think Hufa is globally kind of the leader in what people are doing. I think that, you know, I'll go, I'll be bold and I'll say that. Thank you. One thing that, that Hufa has to do is come up with a community version of Hufa. Maybe it's downsized or something. Jisse Reitsma (32:30.782) You are bold. Sorry. Brent Peterson (32:42.766) And it's free and you can run it and it doesn't have all the features and everything that the full version has. And then MageOS has that with everything decoupled, like Luma stripped out and Hoofa replaced. And then there's a paid version or maybe MageOS has Hoofa as the free one, but you have to go through the rigmarole of decoupling Luma. And then the paid version of MageOS has Hoofa built in. Jisse Reitsma (32:44.606) Mm -hmm. Jisse Reitsma (33:09.406) Yeah. Brent Peterson (33:12.782) with it coming out of the box running without any extras. Jisse Reitsma (33:17.982) Let's ask the Hufa people if they're up for it. I'm in favor. But I still also think that regardless of what would be nice for the overall community, Hufa is also thriving simply also because they have budget and they have money and they're slowly competing actually with Adobe Commerce on multiple different levels. And because of that, they need money. They need to have the funding to allow for that. And if Hufa, its default theme would be free, then there needs to be a portion of the funding from a different angle or different area. Brent Peterson (33:59.054) Yeah, it's a dichotomy, isn't it? There's a definite, there's some tension in there because the best thing for the community would be that there is a free version of Hoofa, but Hoofa can't exist without funding. Jisse Reitsma (34:13.694) Yeah, well, and the funny thing is, of course, everyone who's complaining about that, who has a paid license is involved in Magento and most likely somehow involved with the developing web shops where the merchant pays for that web shop with big money. So money talks anyway. And I think actually that fact is one way that I've always sold people that actually that license is not expensive at all. So the Hufa license for the Hufa themes is 1000 euros, so let's say 1000 US dollars. Then actually you could also say that you can get started with Luma as well. But one thing that you of course need to do then is make sure that the website is performant and et cetera. So things like page speeds and core web vitals and et cetera. So that's where Hufa out of the box is fast, but with Luma you can still spend enough budget. on tuning the performance. And that brings in all kinds of different techniques, some of the techniques supported by Magento itself, some techniques through third party vendors. But then in the end, I think actually the challenge here would be that that tuning of Luma needs to be in a lower budget for less money than actually that 1000 US dollars, because otherwise you could just be better off with buying that license altogether. And at that moment, well, you can do the math, you can do the calculation. And then actually the Hufa license is cheaper actually than Luma. Brent Peterson (35:50.606) Yeah, I mean, if you think about it in terms of buying a car, it's like buying a 10 year old car and trying to make it go and have all the features of a brand new car. Like, let's just say you want to get a Tesla or you want to go with a Hyundai i20 and you want to make the both perform the same. You're going to have to spend a lot of money on the Hyundai to make it go as fast as a Tesla. Jisse Reitsma (36:02.814) Yep. Jisse Reitsma (36:10.43) Yeah, exactly. And of course, you can still. Jisse Reitsma (36:16.318) Yeah, and the whole point is you can still make money with a webshop that is actually performing bad. But if you want to be in the top results, you need to invest from the beginning in the right technology. And well, and I think that that's making up for the funding. But yeah, what I've always been triggered by is actually that Willem Wichtman, a Dutch guy, a friend of mine, he... Brent Peterson (36:22.542) That's true. Jisse Reitsma (36:46.206) He came up with Hufa. But actually in a time when everyone was complaining about Luma being bad, but already in the bare bones technology of Luma, you can see that Luma as a theme extends upon the blank theme and the blank theme actually extends upon the core, but nothing is preventing you from just letting go of Luma, letting go of blank, replacing therefore all of the JavaScript and CSS with something else. It's just that everyone was waiting for Adobe to do that. And that reminds me of a conversation that I had in 2008 or 2009 with Joof Kutner, where he introduced me the XML layer of the XML layout layer of Magento. And he explains, well, we've now built this current front end on top of it. But what we envision is that people just come up with their own CSS JavaScript and HTML and build something out of it as they wish. Well, and then 20, what is it, 25 years later, no, 15 years later, it's only that Hufa came up with that solution. So personally, I don't see Hufa as necessarily the only way forward. It's more that we need initiatives like Hufa and MHS to prove that open source is not borrowing the source code of Adobe or Benjanto and just putting it to use and then complaining if it's not good enough. The real power of open source is that you can take it, strip it, whatever you want, and then build something better on top of it. And that specific thing doesn't really require Hufa to come up with a new license. It's basically somebody else who's saying, well, Tailwind, CSS, and Alpine JavaScript, I don't like them. I'm going to choose something else, Bootstrap 2 or so. And then on top of that, I'm going to... to build my own custom theme that is even faster. So it's more that that realization is important. Brent Peterson (38:45.038) Yeah, I want to ask a technical question. What would prevent the Hoofah team from creating a version of MageOS that is branched and that is everything is stripped away, like you were just saying, the everything is blank is gone, Luma is gone, Hoofah is the default, and for 2000 euros, you could buy this version. and have that fork for you as the vendor. So out of the box, you're getting everything you need without all that garbage that came from the original version. What's stopping them from doing something like that? Jisse Reitsma (39:28.094) Yeah. Because I think actually on a practical level, what Meizu S is now currently doing is they're looking at the source code of Magento as it's currently being maintained on GitHub. They reverse engineer how actually from that source code all of the packages come to being. And while actually producing then the packages as a mirror of Magento. So that's the direct copy of things. they also are translating everything into major S bracket packages. And at that very moment, it's about stripping out pointless things that nobody needs. But that's just a few things because they don't want to be too opinionated to say, okay, we're going to remove, I don't know, all of the GraphQL packages because we disagree with GraphQL. So they keep still a lot of things in there. But they are also adding already a couple of things on top of it. And that's making up for the logo that you have in the Made .OS admin panel. So there's a fresh theme. That's making up for the chat GPT integration that is already there or coming up. That's making up for the Made .OS, what is it? The asynchronous handlers additions on top of the message queue. So it's already in there. It's just that, the portion of new stuff that is added on top of it is not yet that much known. And it feels kind of like still experimental, like, hey, can we add a couple of packages on top of it and prove that made to us has an added value. If this is done a couple of times, then let's say made to us is currently at one version 1 .0 .1, if I'm still correct. Brent Peterson (41:07.79) Right. Jisse Reitsma (41:18.078) Then if a major as 2 points more 1 .4 comes out or so then at that moment it could be a strategic decision to say, okay, let's drop Luma and blank and let's drop a lot of other things if you don't want it And from that moment onwards it becomes more interesting to to see how that could be driven into a new direction But I think still the the stupid thing is like well, if I is a paid license Brent Peterson (41:41.006) Got it. Jisse Reitsma (41:45.854) Luma is still the default theme. And we don't have a lot of other choices except for going headless. So even though there's already a lot of choices, it's still not the perfect amount of choices yet. But yeah, I personally see that as work in progress. Brent Peterson (42:05.518) Yeah, I think the breeze theme is the other one that's out there that's that has a little bit of popularity. Jisse Reitsma (42:10.622) Yeah, for sure. But it's partially based upon the same stack as Luma. So Knockout Require is still in there, but they've just made sure that, let's say, the flaws, why Luma is slow. They've tried to optimize those flaws in a lot of different ways. But I think also just under the paid license of Breeze. I'm not sure about their pricing and their licensing model, but it's again yet another example where it's at least the monolith of Magento being extended with Athene, which is not Luma to the very least, so that's a good thing. And it's also not headless, which is just something that people have nightmares of. Brent Peterson (42:58.254) Yeah, I think that the Breeze one has an open source version. I believe so, I'm not 100%. All right, I want to wrap up our talk today and talk a little bit about ShopWare. You mentioned it earlier. I want to talk about the possibility of what would it look like to combine the two communities, ShopWare and Magento, and what would be the problem if we did that? Jisse Reitsma (43:05.438) They do, cool. Jisse Reitsma (43:26.238) Yeah, well, I think in Europe, definitely Magento and Shopware are both pretty big. And if you look at it in Germany, where Shopware is actually based, then you can see that for some time, Magento has been on the decline and Shopware on the rise. So there, you can see a lot of developers and a lot of agencies that are actually doing both. And theoretically, if you say, well, the community is made up out of people and those people are doing both, then the community can do both as well. I think actually that's something that was done in Poland under the label MeetCommerce. And then there was another MeetCommerce in Spain and another one in Mexico? No? No, I don't know. Anyway, so MeetCommerce was a more general name instead of just a... Brent Peterson (44:15.726) Hmm, I'm not sure. Jisse Reitsma (44:22.974) saying meet Magento. What I personally see is still that developers are either really good at Magento or really good at shopware or sometimes a little bit of both. But because it's still two different technologies and extensions, they are a totally different game and the architecture is different. It's not that easy that you could say, okay, let's merge. the communities altogether, or merge the communities together as well. It's more that Chopra definitely cleverly hooks into the story that Magento is on a decline because of all of the weird steps that Adobe is taking. But I think actually that now Mejoo S and Hufa are there. A lot of Magento agencies in the Netherlands, that crossed over to Shopware are actually crossing back again because they simply see, hey, but whatever was missing with Luma and et cetera is now back again with Hufa as well. So yeah, I personally see that Magento and Shopware are more ecosystems, each one on their own, but it's never wrong to learn from one and another. but melting the communities together is, I think, nearly impossible. But I would also say that it's not really needed because, well, at least the Magenta community is, again, a little bit on the rise. Brent Peterson (45:55.694) Yeah, I think maybe I'm thinking more for the US that there would be some benefit in terms of some synergy and trying to bring everybody together. But I think Mark Schust said it best that the magenta community in the US is the same hundred people over and over again. And the only time you see all hundred and you wouldn't even see that many would be at Meet Magento New York or Meet Magento Florida, where you just see the same people. Jisse Reitsma (46:19.07) Yeah. Brent Peterson (46:21.87) And honestly, out of whatever our population is, 320 some million or 300 plus million people, 100 people is not that many people in the US to do that. I think I was at Florida, it was mainly Europeans. It had to be at least half Europeans at Meet Magenta Florida. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the recreational activities around Meet Magenta Florida are much more intriguing. Jisse Reitsma (46:31.902) For sure, yeah. Jisse Reitsma (46:39.87) Yeah, and they all wanted to escape the bad weather in Europe. Brent Peterson (46:50.638) than the actual event itself. Ravi does a great job, by the way. It was such a great event. And I would say that it is one that you can't miss. I think it's fantastic. He does such a great job. And, you know, I meet Magento's, that Marcia does New York and Ravi's doing Florida. That is sort of like the hook that keeps people engaged. And I think, okay, we'll close it out on this. The frustrating part for me, Jisse Reitsma (46:50.878) Yeah. Jisse Reitsma (46:55.23) Cool. Jisse Reitsma (47:08.798) In Florida. Brent Peterson (47:20.622) What I hear when I, cause I haven't been to a meet me gentle event in Europe in, since before the pandemic. But what I hear from Adobe at these events is that Adobe's committed to the community. They have this slide where they put the Venn diagram up that says it's two communities, one or two ecosystems, one guy. I don't know what they're saying. They're saying set. They're, they're saying there's a split, whatever they're saying. but. Jisse Reitsma (47:40.254) Yeah, yeah. Brent Peterson (47:44.59) what we hear this, right? But then what we don't see anything after that. We don't see any engagement in the community. There's nobody out there speaking about anything. There's nothing that connects the community with Adobe commercial. Like there was, and there should be. There should be one person in the entire company that bridges the gap between the community. And right now, my opinion is Adobe is a hundred percent leaning on Magento Association to do that. And that's, I think that's the wrong person. That's the wrong play. They have to have somebody inside and we'll call it an evangelist. They should have a evangelist or an ambassador or somebody within Adobe, a community manager, all these terms, like I'm just making them up right now. Like I know they didn't exist before today. They should have somebody that does that, that helps. This is the. Jisse Reitsma (48:27.87) Yeah. Jisse Reitsma (48:34.398) This was the joke, right? Brent Peterson (48:37.07) They should have somebody within Adobe that is their job to help connect with the community. And honestly, that doesn't have to be just Adobe. It could be Experience Manager plus Adobe Commerce. It could help bridge this huge or larger community. Jisse Reitsma (48:50.942) Well, yeah, but personally, I think there's another step before that, and that is that Adobe needs to be more serious about trying to maintain that community as is, because otherwise it's not up to them, but it's more up to the community what happens to the future of both. And that sounds a little bit strange, but that's, I think, also where we both are in agreement that if... If Adobe is not doing anything about the current situation, then the two of Magento open source, and Adobe on the other side, those two are going to be driven further and further apart. And then in the end, that slide about, well, two communities coming together, that's really like a broken thing. So the only way to fix that is to listen to both sides. But... I think actually on the Magento Association site and the Made to Web site, there's at least people that are really trying their best to make sure that they're listening and open for any kind of opportunity that is there with Adobe itself. But at Adobe, there's also similar people, but those people are actually minor managers. And there's not an official position from Adobe to say, hey, but this person is really important because that's the... connection between two worlds. That's kind of like what you say. There needs to be a single position that is important enough instead of just a couple of employees that are just also, by the way, talking to the community as well. It needs to be strategy on its own to keep the open source project healthy. Brent Peterson (50:34.862) Absolutely. Issa, as I close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they want. This means you can plug your business or your kids or your kids' school or your favorite McDonald's in the Netherlands. What would you like to plug today? Jisse Reitsma (50:51.902) Well, first of all, I think my plug was almost at the beginning where I just mentioned I was doing training and I have on demand videos. So if people don't like Mark Schust, they can watch my videos instead. But the shameless plug is actually this one. I need to rise a little bit and I don't know if it's in reverse or... But it's not rage against the machine, but mage against the regime. Brent Peterson (51:20.046) That's good. Mage against the regime. Jisse Reitsma (51:20.286) And it's falling nicely, Mates Against the Regime. It's nicely falling together with whatever we talked about that I personally feel that Mates OS is actually the little Mates Against the Regime that we're trying to change the big giant of Adobe one way or another. And actually what I'm aiming for is to do a couple of videos that are going to be published on YouTube to promote the new brand of Mates Against the Regime. Brent Peterson (51:48.398) And I love this idea. And by the way, I just love your creativity and how you come up with all these fantastic little tidbits that you had some coasters before and made talk. You had little coasters that were shit talk or something. Yeah, talk for your shit. Jisse Reitsma (51:48.734) And that's the plug. Jisse Reitsma (51:55.582) stupid little things. Jisse Reitsma (52:05.118) yeah, talk beer shit. And I, yeah, that was actually, I'm going to show you. So this is, sorry for the lights, but you can see there in the back, a couple of posters and then those posters are originating from the maids test fest conference. And the maids test fest conference was, well, Magento about testing and it was a fest. And I think because of that fest, anything was basically allowed. So there was a lot of cursing. I'm not a person in favor of cursing, but. needed to be a little bit cursing like project fuck -ups and they're being fucked up without testing and stuff like that. So rough undertone but it was fun to have that. Brent Peterson (52:45.198) Right, good. All right. Well, Isa, Isa, it's great to speak to you today. I think that we need to do, it would be interesting to do like a little panel with somebody from the Magento community here, and somebody in Europe and somebody in India even to kind of get those perspectives. And maybe we have some pre -done questions and I don't know, let's think about that. Jisse Reitsma (52:49.534) Brent. For sure, thank you. Brent Peterson (53:14.318) You and I can be the c - Jisse Reitsma (53:14.622) Yeah, and maybe even better to also really talk about how to move forward, like what kind of expectations people have in each region about what would be the best thing for Magento in the upcoming future. Brent Peterson (53:27.502) Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it's been. Yeah. Thank you so much. Have a great. Have a great evening. Jisse Reitsma (53:29.694) Cool. Jisse Reitsma (53:33.566) And thank you so much.