Is Magento really opensource? [closed]

Question

For the last month or two I have been trying to wrap my head around Magento, with a moderate degree of success. While it has been billed as the next great e-commerce system, I have come to realize that although it has some pretty neat features... in reality it's a step backward for open source projects as far as development and community is concerned.

A look at the forums and it's full of developers complaining about the lack of documentation, the joke of an official wiki (there are people who post ads on the official wiki), and also reports of the upgrades breaking core functionality. Most of these posts and valid bug reports are ignored by the Magento staff. A request for some XML diagrams of the core modules has been ignored for a year!

The IRC chat is pointless as a lot of new users are greeted by moderators who tell them to RTFM!

It seems like there is a conflict of interest for the company that runs Magento: they now sell an enterprise version of Magento and their core business is in providing support for Magento users. I feel it isn't in their best interest to provide documentation for the over-complicated architecture (going through eight layers of folders to update just a single image).

Is Magento an open source system?

Answer 1

I understand your frustration all too well, but open-source doesn't mean documentation or support.

The attitude the Magento team has is "here's the program, here are some forums and a little documentation, from there on you're on your own". Sounds bad, but they've already released for free what must have taken thousands of person-hours to create. You have to be at least a little grateful for that.

As for documentation and support, you can't really expect them to keep working for random strangers for free. Besides, few of those people who complain about lack of documentation come back later on to write how-to guides when they finally understand the system.