Magento Enterprise Edition: How to Stifle a Growing Community
Yesterday Varien announced Magento Enterprise Edition, which is a commercially-licensed e-commerce platform built on their free open source version. From Varien’s standpoint, I can understand their need to monetize their product, however I feel this is a big disappointment to the growing Magento development community. With over to 750,000 downloads in less than a year, Magento’s growth has been quick and has gained a ton of momentum from developers and critics. What better way to totally reverse that momentum by locking up the best features in a premium version and slapping a huge pricetag on it ($8,900 A YEAR?!).
From a developer’s standpoint, I was really looking forward to a lot of the features that were being hyped up by the team on the roadmap and/or forums (specifically the gift cards). Now that a lot of beneficial features will be locked up in an expensive premium version, I expect to see that excitement and momentum from the community fade. Keep Reading