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Comment by themaveness | Hacker News Reader

We have the GH organization created. Its all private for the moment.

Basically we have never forked a software like this before. We are going over the license and trying to make sure all our i's are dotted and our t's are crossed so we do not end up in a lawsuit.

The project will totally be open source, it will be under the same license that the code is currently under OSL 3.0.

We aren't trying to bait and switch I promise. This is something we have been talking about for a couple of months, but we decided on this week. So when we open the repo to the public to help with we just want to be in a position we can defend if it happens to go to court. Nothing kills a good idea faster than an opening day lawsuit.

We would love it if you guys helped. We need it.

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thank you for clarifying that.

However, I think after reading the comments below that the scope of the project is to maintain backward compatibility with the agencies/authors of plugins in the Prestashop ecosystem.

What we were looking for is something that was trying to do new in the webshop ecosystem. Even I misjudged your "lack of MVC" comment below. My perception was that you were bringing together a lot of people from the Prestashop community and building something new with modern day best practices.

Using an ORM is the smallest of them. MVC is another. asset pipeline could have been a third.

But if you attempt any of this.. you will risk breaking backwards compatibility with any number of plugins out there. Which is why I'm doubtful you will try to do anything new. The way I see it is that you will maintain a bugfixed release of Prestashop 1.6 with incremental changes to support the plugin ecosystem out there.

Personally, I think you are aiming too low. You want to make something better than Prestashop 1.7 which is why your holy grail is to maintain backward compatibility and fix some plugins (like the Paypal one you talk about). But from what I have seen, your real competition is the Shopify of the world. Even Magento 2. Not sure if you have seen the docs, but Magento 2 has started adopting best practices out there:

1. composer for dependency management - http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/install-gde/prereq/in...

2. database migrations - http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/install-gde/install/c...

Let me be honest, I am winging a lot of this because you guys are asking great questions. I think I am either not expressing our plan adequately or it is a bad plan. I don't know, its late friday night and I have been having a couple of drinks after a hard week.

We are going to end up rewriting things with better practices. This is something that HAS to happen. Its not the first thing we are going to do though. We need to build a userbase in the cheapest, quickest, easiest way possible. Not having to scrap everything, getting a more stable shop with new features is attractive to people.

I am purely looking at this from a business sense. Yes, we can take the code, we can convert it over 6 months to be something totally different, more robust, better designed, just bad ass code. In that time we can miss the window and not have as many shops migrate over to our platform. Thats not a good strategy in my mind. I see great ideas all the time on GH that have been abandoned because they are not profitable. We are trying to cut a middle line deal here in the beginning. We want to make a profit to pay for expenses and we want to give merchants what they want.

Once you have users in a platform it is easier to get them into a big upgrade than to try to get users from scratch, or get the to migrate. I realize (I think) you are looking at this from a purely code / application development stand point. Look at it from a business stand point. Merchants generally look at two things when evaluating a platform. Is my payment gateway accepted and are my shipping options accepted. If we break these things out the gate we will either be stuck writing all of these modules, or we will just lose those customers. On the other hand if we get them to migrate and have a grand plan later, the agencies and companies that keep up these modules will rewrite them. I am trying to mix logical business with logical development to come up with a successful plan.

look i understand your struggle. but you will HAVE to make a call. your points below about "not having to worry about zero days like wordpress" and "not having an MVC" is incompatible with your statemnt of "we will do bugfixes for next 6 months and go from there".

I would even go to the extent of questioning any success you think you will have with the bugfix approach.

Prestashop inc has 9 million USD of funding. Your reason of existence will vanish the day that Prestashop fixes the few bugs that you have. What do you think will happen then ? Will you yourself continue on this fork... or will you say "oh well, the Paypal module works on prestashop 1.7 again"

If you are doing this, then do this for the reason you want to do it subconsciously - all the MVC stuff you are dreaming about.

>Once you have users in a platform it is easier to get them into a big upgrade than to try to get users from scratch, or get the to migrate.

There is zero incentive to stay. The advantages of your "new" platform are so minimal that people will instead make and buy new plugins for 1.7 . In fact sorry for being blunt, but the existence of your fork is just as long as it takes for all agencies to port their code to Prestashop 1.7.

If your users migrate, they will force you to never break compatibility. So you will basically become Prestashop 1.8 . There is no possibility of a grand plan later.

I really think you are pulling an outsider looking in on this. PrestaShop HAD 9m in funding. It was wasted on deploying a cloud which is being shut down on Feb 1. It was wasted on a myriad of other things.

As someone that works in depth with PrestaShop, very in depth, I don't think they can do it. I talk to the founder regularly, I actually emailed him and let him know we were forking. I believe in that kind of courtesy still.

Let me ask you a simple question that might change your mind about things. How many developers do you think work on PrestaShop? Currently the company has about 120 employees. 4. There are 4 core developers. Out of 120 employees 4 developers. I know all of them. I respect them. I don't agree with them sometimes, but jesus I know they are regular guys in a shitty position.

I think the bug fixing approach will work. Maybe it won't. That is what I am betting on. Like I mentioned before, I am just one person in a machine being driven by other people. Sign up to our mailing list. When we release the code as OS we are going to have a gitter, we can all get in it and air our opinions and hash out a way forward. I am expressing my ideas not necessarily the ideas of the project. I will argue my case and if I lose I am going to do what I can to help the idea that wins. To me this is what being a community is about. We are working with a product that is under a totalitarian regime I feel. I am not leading people out of one into another. I am the first to say I don't have the best ideas. We want more collaboration. We want people from outside the Prestashop ecosphere to come in and give ideas. In the end these are things that will help us.

very well.

could you atleast put up the gitter and allow us to sign up there. mailing list feels very "commercial"

Hi Zebra, I might be getting old, but your request seems very strange to me.

I have subscribed many mailing lists during my life and there is no single one that I could define in any way as "commercial".

On the other side, Gitter is a commercial platform that depends on one of two other commercial platforms (Twitter or Github).

I wonder if I should revide my opinion on the usage of Gitter for free software projects...

yes - you should revise your opinion. Thirtybees mailing list is a Mailchimp signup... not usenet. Please double check.

slack or gitter is atleast a two way street.

> What we were looking for is something that was trying to do new in the webshop ecosystem.

Did you look at http://sylius.org/ ?

this is very cool!

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