We Took the Badge Down

A friend came back from a trade show in Chicago with a brochure. This was 2007, maybe early 2008.

The company behind it did not even have a booth. A hosting company had let them leave a stack of brochures on the corner of its desk. The platform was called Magento.

I was a builder before I was a business owner. I liked software I could open up, see the code, change it, and make it do what a client actually needed. In those days that meant osCommerce and X-Cart. They worked, but you lived with their limits.

Magento felt different. The people behind it took ecommerce marketing as seriously as the code. It looked like an unusual mix of astute business people and nerds. The platforms I had been using were led mostly by nerds, and you could feel the business being left on the table.

That friend and I built our first Magento store together for his family’s jewelry business. We built it on version 0.9, before Magento had even reached 1.0, and launched in the spring of 2008. Within a year, my company was building on Magento exclusively. A platform that entered the world as a stack of brochures on someone else’s desk was carrying real businesses within months.

The community did that.

There was a Community Edition and an Enterprise Edition. We lived in the Community Edition and pushed it as far as it would go. In time, we served enterprise clients too. We eventually hired one of Magento’s original core developers. We knew where the value lived because we had seen the code.

The feature matrix was never the point. The strongest thing Magento had was always its community: developers answering each other’s questions at 2 a.m., agencies shipping fixes upstream, and merchants betting their businesses on code they could read.

Magento was created largely in Ukraine, and I was one of the early US partners to lean into working with developers in Eastern Europe. The platform was complicated. It demanded a discipline I frankly could not find as easily in the US. Running a team several time zones away from our clients probably cost us a few projects over the years. I would do it exactly the same way again.

The job was to find where the greatest value was for my clients.

Magento was sold. Then sold again. Then again. With each sale, the community mattered a little less to the people who owned the product. Not out of malice. It just never showed up on the balance sheet.

For fifteen years, some version of a partner badge sat in our footer. Magento partner, then through the eBay years, then Adobe Solution Partner. Same spot. Three owners. Each one a little further from the people who made the platform worth partnering with.

Adobe still ships bug fixes for Magento Open Source, and I am glad they do. But I think we can be honest about what that is: enough maintenance to keep the platform from becoming an embarrassment, not an investment in its future.

The Mage-OS Association says thank you for every patch and means it. It is also fully prepared to carry the platform the day Adobe stops.

That is not a protest. It is the community doing what it has always done: taking responsibility for the thing it loves.

Meanwhile, something changed that has nothing to do with org charts.

The cost of intelligence is falling fast. Most of what it costs to own a software platform is the work wrapped around it: upgrades, patches, integrations, and the careful work of keeping a store fast and secure. AI is driving down the price of exactly that work.

A lot of companies chose to own their commerce stack when ownership was expensive. It is not expensive anymore. We rebuilt our own workflow around that fact. It changed what we charge and how fast we ship.

Rocket Web’s future is not dictated by investors or stockholders. That independence is why we can make a decision like this one. I want our clients to have the same option: own the software that runs their store, with no license that can be repriced and no roadmap that can be pointed away from them.

So we took the badge down.

We are leaning in all the way. We are active partners of the Mage-OS Association. Our NetSuite Connector and Rocket Shopping Feeds are headed to Mage-OS Lab, where the community can carry them further than we could alone. The connector is going open source. Shopping Feeds already is.

We are moving clients off Adobe Commerce licenses and onto a platform they own.

For merchants who stay on Adobe Commerce, we will keep running their stores at the same standard as always. Adobe does not need to be the villain for this decision to be right. This is about what we have been for since the day my friend handed me that brochure.

If you run a store, whatever platform you are on, there is one question worth asking this week:

Do I own my e-commerce future, or am I renting it and hoping the landlord never changes the rules?