I cannot see AMP remaining viable in the long run. I think there is going to be a lot of push back or non adoption because the walled garden is just a way to track users and advertise to them better.
I can speak to the GitHub repo and source. Basically a lot of the companies that are forking are agencies that are affiliated with PrestaShop. We are bound under certain contracts (not ones that deal with the OSL though). We basically decided this move this week.
The reason the GH repo is not public yet is because we are changing the licensing (the copyright attribution not the type) and the branding. Also we are going over the code and commenting what is PrestaShop's and ours. On a basic level we are trying to do everything right with the code to cover our asses and not get sued. As for the license we are not experts in licensing, we are developers. It seems easiest for us to keep the same license that is on the code than to try to transfer it to another system. It is going to stay under the OSL 3.0.
That being said, that is why we have the mailing list sign up. We are shooting to have everything cleaned by early in the week where we can release the public repo and a road map of what needs to be worked on. This is going to be a totally open source project, we are just trying to do it in a way that will not end up in us getting sued for some minor violation of the license.
As for a community platform, that is what I am going for. I own an agency that manages around 800 PrestaShop websites. I see my clients leaving. I see them leaving for stupid reasons
(not on their part, stupid reason on PrestaShop's part). I am trying to stop the bloodletting in my company and give my clients what I hear them asking for.
Transparency is what we are going for. I want users to suggest features. I look at other platforms often and say things like 'damn that would make a nice core feature'. Its part of the reason we are breaking off. There is nothing more demoralizing than spending a day or two working on a feature for an open source platform then they reject it. Not only do they reject it, the company (PrestaShop) takes the idea and sells it as a paid module. This happened to one of our developers.
tldr: We are going to be totally open source under the same OSL 3.0 license we just need to properly deal with and attribute the code before we release it to try to prevent a lawsuit.
To be totally honest these are the kind of decisions that kill a platform like this. Postgres is great and everything, but the low number of hosts that adopt it would sink something like this.
You really have to look at the market. The main installation user will be using softaculous or a similar installer on cpanel. Which does not support Postgres out of the box. Sure, if you have root you can add it, but that will effectively kill our US shared hosting / managed VPS market.
The goal is to make it where merchants can use the software easily and it has features they want. Picking a Postgres design effectively limits us in using compatible modules out of the box and it effectively limits our hosting choices. I don't think its anything we are going to do at the start, but I would not rule out a version of it in the future.
I have been helping with the fork, that is the plan. First thing we have to stabilize it and fix the bugs. We are refactoring a paypal module right now that has buttons that are not connecting to anything. It calls methods that do not exist. It was something that someone made to essentially try to get over on people.
Once we get things stabilized we are going to figure out the best way to rewrite things. That is why we are trying to be very community focused. We need to see the pain points of merchants, what they want, what would make them succeed.
We are scrubbing the whole platform for legacy code and updating what we can while maintaining compatibility with the current modules and themes. Then we are really going to break this down and develop something more awesome than awesome.