What's Up with Magento Open-Source Part 1 with Matthias Schreiber

Brent Peterson (00:03.05) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. This is the community edition of Talk Commerce and today I have Matthias Schreiber. Matthias, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us your new day-to-day role and maybe a little bit of your past and then tell us a passion that you have in life. Mathias Schreiber (00:12.132) Yeah, good enough. Yeah. Mathias Schreiber (00:23.916) or one of the few. Okay, so let's start. My name is Matthias Schreiber. That's the harsh German pronunciation. I am currently the executive director of the Magento Association. So the nonprofit that's behind the Magento open source version, the events, et cetera, et cetera. And in my... Last 20 years, I was dedicated to open source software to an extent. I started out with an agency doing a content management system, which is mainly out of Europe, which is called Typeo 3. After roughly 12 years, Typeo 3 was in a bit of a downwards spiral. Mathias Schreiber (01:19.884) talk to my co-owners of the agency and ask them, hey guys, I have a brilliant idea. I still want to get my salary and get paid, but I don't want to work here anymore because I want to dedicate my time and my passion to the open source project full-time. Luckily, they were able to see the benefit behind it, and that ended up in me doing that for roughly two years. And after that, the organizational entity behind the type of three was so smart to build a company and then I was CEO of that company for roughly seven years. And then I wanted to do something different. And then Magento seemed like a little bit in peril as well. So I decided that I guess my passion could be used here to be. I could be used well there. And so I decided to no longer pursue this, but now pursue Magento. And yeah, well, as you might have guessed, I love open source. I love the principle behind it. I think open source has a lot of benefits other than, oh, I get something for without paying. but I think that open source is a great equalizer in society, especially globally. I believe that giving something back in order to get something more is this give a little, take a little thing, and then I surf in my spare time, so this whole what goes around comes around principle applies there as well. I also like the business side of things, and that's what I think a lot of people tend to forget. There's a lot of people who use open source that don't share this passion, and personally, I think that's okay. Normally those people are just willing to simply go like, hey, you know what? I can pay for stuff. I don't want to contribute code back because... Mathias Schreiber (03:38.836) I want my employees to do something different or I don't think I'm good enough or whatever. That's like a quadrillion reasons not to contribute back to open source via code. But there's people who are just business people that say, hey, if I invest in this and I'm able to sponsor something or to partner, then my company looks good. My conscience is like well off, so to speak. And I like to weave all this together to make open source truly viable. Because I'm a developer originally, but I come from a business background primarily. So I have like a formal education in wholesale, for example. So I do know how to calculate stuff. Yeah. So that's basically combining these two things is what I really, really like. Brent Peterson (04:36.822) That's awesome. All right, so there's one thing I need to do before we continue on to our conversation. I need to tell you a joke, and you need to tell me if the joke should remain open source, or if you feel as though this should be the enterprise paid version of the joke. Mathias Schreiber (04:52.042) Is this like the test where the Germans have a sense of humor? Brent Peterson (04:56.511) I'll follow up with that, but first I'm going to tell you, all you have to do is just tell me if the joke is open source or if it's a paid version of the joke. So here we go. How do you get a hundred math teachers in a room that only fits 99? You carry the one. Mathias Schreiber (04:58.41) Ha ha! Mathias Schreiber (05:15.98) I still have to process and figure out whether I don't think I get it. Help me out. So, so, so open sourcing would benefit me greatly right now because they will be a pull request, eventually explaining the whole thing to me in the review section going back and forth. Brent Peterson (05:22.544) That's not even... Yes. Brent Peterson (05:30.818) Yes, so we've known each other for less than a year, so you will soon learn that my jokes are horrendous and they always have to be explained. So anyways, so I will say I was at Meet Magento Poland, I don't know, in 2018 or 17. And somebody gave me a graphic that said the colors of the German flag. The blue is for humor. Anyways. Mathias Schreiber (06:05.573) Yeah, I think I just proved that point by not getting the joke. Brent Peterson (06:09.29) No, no, it's okay. You carry the one. Like, you know, in math you carry a one to get to the next, but it doesn't. Mathias Schreiber (06:14.39) Oh, over to the thing. Yeah, okay, that indeed makes sense. Huh. Brent Peterson (06:18.863) Yeah, sorry. And so my first speaking engagement in the Magento community was at Magento Live Germany in Munich in 2014. And I started off by telling a joke and stone-faced. Mathias Schreiber (06:32.352) Didn't... didn't click, oh boy. Mathias Schreiber (06:37.329) What I found out during sessions like that is jokes that involve yourself, like putting you in really embarrassing situations, those work with Germans really, really well. Brent Peterson (06:47.602) Oh, I have a lot of those. Okay, I can do that. Good point. Thank you for the tip I'm gonna use open source tip for yes, german jokes All right. So, um, I you know, I do want to talk about the magenta community And I would like to touch on community in general but uh tell us about um magenta association and maybe let's do Do a if you could do a Mathias Schreiber (06:52.416) Open sourcing it. Brent Peterson (07:16.106) five-minute overview of how it's changed in the last couple years because there's been some big changes even in the last year Mathias Schreiber (07:22.772) Yeah, I think, let me try to shorten that down. So the original idea was that you need a legal entity to allow people to do meet Magento events because somebody needs to use the trademark, sub-license the trademark, just legal stuff. And when Adobe took over the Magento trademarks, The idea was that the Meet Magento Association would be changed to the Magento Association because then you don't have to go through the entire filing process and all the complex stuff. And at the same time, Adobe provided Magento Association with generous funding, which was unfortunately, in retrospect, put into a management company that provides to run your association as a service, so to speak. Um, and they do a, a really, really good job at keeping protocol and making sure that there's meeting minutes for everything and making sure that everybody gets invited and, uh, and all those organizational things, which for me as a German are really close to my heart. But yet again, they don't understand how open source in itself works, because I think open source people are a special breed of people with a certain mindset. And what I've seen in the last year since I'm on the job, well, roughly last year, is that the... Magento community in itself is very diverse in terms of the mindset that they're following. You have super tough business people on the one end of the spectrum and you have the true open source GPL purist on the other end of the spectrum and everything in between. I think that wasn't working too well for such a management company which basically Mathias Schreiber (09:32.824) comes from a background of, okay, when's the next charity dinner that the next charity golf tournament that we organize in order to raise funds? Because that stuff don't fly with open source people. And so that resulted in well, not the outcome that everybody wanted to see in from magenta association, especially then with the pandemic and Adobe trying to figure out where to go with this magenta thing because open source was new for them as well. And how to deal with the community, how to deal with very passionate people. And yeah, so I took over like a year ago, roughly, a little bit less to try and bring this expertise that I have in that field into the whole mix and we're slowly turning things around. I was slightly over five minutes like this. Brent Peterson (10:30.45) Yeah, so I mean, no, it's fine. I mean, I think a lot of the, I'm going to just say complaints, the complaints from the community came from the fact that there wasn't a lot of communication out of the board and there was a lot of, uh, red tape involved with, uh, with Smith Buckland that didn't allow for things to move in a pace that others would like to see it move in, right? That that's a good, a good synopsis of, of some of the problems we saw leading up to a year ago before you started. Mathias Schreiber (10:58.12) Yes, yes. But this is, it's also, I mean technically we're talking about expectations not being met. That's how, like if I really had to dumb it down like this would be the gist of it. Smith Buckland on the one hand, and for those who don't know that's the management company that was hired, were not a good fit per se. On the other hand, COVID wasn't helping and on the third variable in this whole equation was Adobe being a huge company which cannot move fast for a variety of reasons. Then communication might have been an issue that I can't say right now. I just don't know. Which doesn't mean I don't want to like this. discredit your point or something. I genuinely don't know. But I could imagine it adds up. This is something that still needs to be addressed so that we can get to a good result. I would like it to go a lot faster than it currently does, but I'm personally happy with the ship turning at all rather than discussing the U-turn radius. so to speak. Brent Peterson (12:25.27) Yeah, so I think then, let's just call it the trifecta now. We've got a new entity on the market called MageOS that came out of this frustration. I'm gonna say the frustration was with Adobe more than with Magento Association, but I think the other thing that I'd like to do is let's look forward rather than looking backwards. So let's just say we have this trifecta of communities or of organizations that are now involved the Magento community. And I think your goal and my goal is to get everybody to play together. Mathias Schreiber (13:02.668) Well, that seems to be the most effective way of doing anything, pretty much. Collaboration is in the... And this is going to be super hippie now, but collaboration is at the heart of our species, eventually. And the more you start putting... The more groups you have that try to achieve the same thing, but each on their own, it gets worse. for everyone involved, I think. Brent Peterson (13:37.418) I started a bit of a storm. There's another word that I'd use in front of it, sugar storm or something that starts with the English word S. In fact, you're a German, you can say any swear word you want. So you're in a unique, Germans and Dutch seem to just throw out American swear words like they're candy. Anyways. Mathias Schreiber (13:59.064) Yeah, we use it as attributes. Brent Peterson (14:05.506) Fortunately, the newer versions of Magento, you can have more than 400 attributes on your product. So you can have, and as long as, you know, even with text variable attributes. Side tracked, sorry about that about swear words. I'm trying to create engagement in our community. And I feel like the only way you can get people to respond, or I felt that way, was to push the boundaries with other platforms. And so I did that. And I got a lot of people angry with me because I was promoting another platform over Magento, right? I was saying, Magento, what does it matter what I was saying? You can look up my tweets. I had a whole bunch of tweets. And, you know, I would say, yes, they were divisive and yes, they were versus. And that was a mistake. But in an experiment or in an attempt to create engagement, I was trying different things. Right. So let's call it A-B testing. Mathias Schreiber (14:55.106) Mm. Brent Peterson (15:05.754) I'm particularly frustrated with people saying, A, the Magento community is not around anymore, which I think it's very robust. And then saying that we can only say good things about the Magento community, because other communities then look at us and say, oh, look at what a mess that is. I just wanted to get your feedback on that. Mathias Schreiber (15:26.988) I think I was on a podcast with Caelan Jordan a couple of years ago after the infamous meat magenta in Poland where the fork, which is now major, was not announced, but the possibility of such a drastic measure, and I consider it a drastic measure, was basically outlined. And I had a long conversation. because I was relatively new to the whole magenta thing. And then people started to like, like give me directions, you know, and go like, okay, this is a troublemaker. This is a troublemaker. That's a problematic person, blah, all those kinds of things. And there's like one quote which stuck with me and people quoted back to me, which is, I believe you need troublemakers to ask the hard questions. You don't want trolls. Trolls just want to see the world burn. And especially in social media, one of my favorite quotes from Mike Tyson is, social media enables people to disrespect others without the risk of getting punched in the face. So the trolls, I ignore those people, because they don't add anything to the situation, let alone a solution or something. That's irrelevant. The troublemakers... I think trouble making is sometimes necessary. Of course, I would like it to be that there would be no trouble makers, but in order to not have trouble makers, I need to make sure there's no trouble to make. And sometimes things are like they are. It's like sometimes I get into a fight with my wife, it happens. Like nothing you want to do about it. So no hard feelings from my end. However you start poking into the nest to see if it's still alive, this is also something you gotta do. Nobody complains about the person that removes a hornet's nest from your house by poking it to check if there's hornets around. When you stick in, okay, no, it doesn't make a buzzing sound, maybe we should move back a couple yards. Nobody goes like, why did you poke it? But sometimes you need to poke stuff to find out what's going on. Mathias Schreiber (17:47.564) I'm fine with that. But I think where the anger or the misunderstanding comes from is that in open source people are insanely patriotic towards their single projects, like their main thing. Sometimes I wonder whether people treat it like a girlfriend. When you use some other piece of technology, it's like cheating on your... and then I have this site girlfriend here. People identify with open source projects, I would assume because they put a certain amount of their life into it, and I don't belittle this or think that's a bad thing, it's just an observation. I always like to keep competition close because I personally think as long as it goes, to some other open source project, open source as a whole wins. What's really stupid is open source projects fighting beneath each other while the proprietary guys dry their tears with dollars. Tears of laughter that is, right? I would rather... Brent Peterson (19:01.278) Yeah, and I will say I saw Eric Erway had posted a picture of his Magento mug. Um, and, uh, and the, the CEO of Shopify commented on the fact that he had posted this picture of his Magento mug. Um, which I think is, uh, particularly rich. If you look into what is the Shopify community, right? Th it's not, it's not equal. And maybe there's the same amount of people. who use Shopify, but only because they're a merchant. There's not like, I just thought it was interesting that this CEO of this big company cares about Magento. So it shows for me that showed that, hey, Magento is alive and well and somebody's paying attention. Mathias Schreiber (19:48.62) Yeah, and it's also, I think that Magento, I mean, if we fast forward to the year 2080, and somebody does his doctorate, his dissertation on how open, how e-commerce evolved, Magento will be a part of that. And it could be fortunate timing, or it could be the, the boom in e-commerce itself, but I think that Magento to me was the first, what I would consider like serious e-commerce solution that was out there, that was also affordable for, that doesn't need a million dollar budget to be run. In order to optimize it, no problem. But I think that Magento... over the other style, what was it? It was OS commerce and then XT commerce and then maybe a couple other ones I forgot and I'm sorry about that, but not my feat of expertise back in the early 2000s, so bear with me. But Magento was like this first big thing that hit and people were like, hey, you install it and it just works and you can build your e-commerce stuff. And I think this was like liberating to people. And to me, that's what I meant earlier with the power and the great equalizer of open source. Before that, in e-commerce, you had to be like, I don't know, Home Depot or whatever and be able to buy, where was it? It was like InterShop. Anyone still remember that one? Which was like, oh, you need e-commerce, like really with payment and stuff? Well, InterShop is the way to go. And I think Magento was at the right place at the right time. Brent Peterson (21:33.154) Yeah, I see. Mathias Schreiber (21:44.02) with a good product fit for a broad group of merchants. And basically, spearheaded the e-commerce revolution and now, what's happening is exactly the same that happened to Type of Three. We were like one of the first serious content management solutions that you could put up next to a proprietary solution. And now what happens is that things like WordPress or other SaaS solutions, I don't know, like Wix and Squarespace and all those kinds of things, right? They basically came up and made certain things easier because you don't always need like the super full-fledged solution to build something. And this is also something coming back to this identifying with an open source project. When you're in Magento agency and somebody asks you what's the right platform to use, your answer will be Magento. And then there's all this, all the blog posts. I wish I had a dollar for every blog post. What is the best e-commerce solution? What is the best content management solution? It's a totally wrong question. Question is, what's your demand? What problem are you trying to solve? And then I can answer that. And yeah. Brent Peterson (23:12.858) Yeah, I think early on with Magento, there was people that believed in other solutions and there was people that believed in only selling the one solution you had. I'm saying at a commercial level with Magento. And I always embraced the people that were open to other, there's not one solution for everybody. And I think that's part of the problem that you described earlier. In regards to open source, I was very encouraged in 2019, I think it was, that I joined the Maygen Conference in Cologne and the Haman Brothers showed up. Both the Sebastian and Stefan showed up to the event and they put in a talk and they presented on the talk. And I thought that was incredible that not only do we have theoretic open source competition, but we have them joining us and- Mathias Schreiber (23:51.877) Hehehe Brent Peterson (24:09.794) just describing about an e-commerce solution, not trying to sell shopware. I thought that was a great way of bridging gaps that are there because of a community, right? And it is really, I think you put it, coined it very well in terms of this is my group and I'm not going to talk to another group. It's kind of like in religion, it would be the Catholics and the Lutherans or something like that, right? Um, yeah. Mathias Schreiber (24:34.464) Yep, yeah, we have a history of fighting wars over that. So, arguably America, or the US exists because of those wars. So sometimes you can find opportunity in that stuff. Brent Peterson (24:39.508) Um, so. Brent Peterson (24:46.762) Yeah. Um, and another good example is, is we did this thing called mage Titans and, uh, the, we did it in Austin and, uh, you know, the, uh, partner manager, uh, who's still there, Dan Furtick showed up at our event and he would show up every year. And he wouldn't try to overly sell big commerce, but he was just there to a view what we're doing and B share his experience in his own. ecosystem, which I think is the best way to learn what other ecosystems are doing is by participating in those ecosystems. Mathias Schreiber (25:24.676) Yep, and we have something similar in Germany, which is the CMS garden, which is basically a not-for-profit tiny association with I think like a yearly budget of $3,000. What we do is, what we used to do, is show up as one group at big tech conferences or trade fairs for digital marketing and just show off like, hey, this is... This is the variety and the diversity of open source content management that you can have and you can talk to each and every one of us. I found myself in, I think it was in Boston, selling WordPress, selling the competition to a person at the booth because it solved his problem while the WordPress guy, Gunther, wasn't there. And that's also open source to me. It's like a huge bunch of friends in the end. Brent Peterson (26:23.338) Yeah. I want to touch a little bit on the idea that we shouldn't be disparaging. I want to go back to the hornet's nest. And I had made, I had commented on a comment that I saw about we shouldn't be saying bad things about the community because other people are seeing us and saying our community is disjointed. And my thought to that would be, well, we should be saying things because, number one, it's showing our community is active. And if it's relevant and if it's real, it's a conversation that should be had at least. And then I guess I suppose the thing is where should the conversation be? And I know that you had some conversations in Meet Magenta, New York, behind the scenes. So there's some conversations should happen and behind the scenes. and there's some conversations like the panel discussion you had that should happen in public. Mathias Schreiber (27:21.248) Yeah, that's true. I mean, for the most stuff, it's, I mean, you mentioned that earlier, I would rather look to the future rather than at the past that neither of us can change. There's certain things that I found in this magenta thing, which are just so wild west. And I'm having a really hard time looking at these things. And I see a situation and I can visualize what led to this thing being like that. Going like, oh yeah, we need a Google workspace. Does anyone have a credit card? And then some guy like, yeah, I got a credit card. And then he pays for that. Now three years later. his credit card has changed and suddenly nothing works. And then the question is, okay, where's the actual admin information? Well, you could try one of these five people, which we think were the admin account on this Google workspace. And you know, and fix those things. But this is stuff that, and there's more like that. Where it's... I hold those people close to my heart because it's very pragmatic and get stuff done quickly and we'll figure something out later, but that later never comes. It's like documenting the source code. I would do that later. At a certain point, it's more of a fun story. I didn't have conversations in a closed circle or behind the curtain, so to speak, but it's more like... It's a fun story to share, but it's mostly irrelevant to a lot of people, I would suppose. I didn't deliberately not do this publicly. I'm a very open and honest person, and if I mess something up, you will know because I will tell you that I messed something up. This is also what the beauty of open source is to me. You cannot hide stuff in code, so why hide it in PR-related information? I don't believe in it.