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Michael Bromley
Michael Bromley

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Open Source win: IBM shifts legacy commerce systems to my one-man OSS project

For the past 3.5 years I've been working on an open-source e-commerce platform, Vendure.

It's in a niche known as "headless commerce" which is really hot right now, so I've had lots of interest from investors over the past year. However, I'm determined to see how far I can take things as a bootstrapped indie-hacker.

Yesterday was a major milestone as I was able to announce that IBM have adopted Vendure to replace an outdated, proprietary system that had been slowing them down and causing huge expense in terms of license fees as well as lost developer productivity.

case study image

This is really exciting because it shows just how much progress the open-source movement has made, that even the largest enterprises are willing to bet on lean, relatively new projects like Vendure - a single-person open-source project!

It's a sign that the technology stack is important. Developer experience, maintainability, documentation, openness - all these things actually contribute to the cost of running a system. So from both a technical and financial viewpoint, OSS solutions increasingly make more sense.

There's that old phrase, "nobody got fired for buying IBM". Well, I'm hoping that this will make it clear that my project is a safe choice, no matter the company size.

Just thought I'd share the success!

If you want to know more about Vendure, I recently wrote a short intro tutorial, and I plan a more in-depth series of tutorials in the coming weeks.

Top comments (4)

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serignembackeka profile image
Serigne Mbacke KA

This milestone definitely confirm all the beliefs I had about this project.
Really awesome job! Hats off

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michlbrmly profile image
Michael Bromley

Thanks for your support 😁

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Albert Coronado

Just Brutal!!! Incredible work!!!!

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michlbrmly profile image
Michael Bromley

Thank you!