In the beginning there was Spree Commerce, a still very popular eCommerce platform for Rails. Spree was an incredibly active, community-maintained project that saw a lot of activity. In 2015 however, Stembolt, an eCommerce consulting firm, didn't like the direction the project was taking and created a fork they called Solidus, which put the focus on stability, ease of upgrade and backwards-compatibility. Shortly after, the Spree project was acquired by First Data, a payment services provider, which completely shut down the development of the project.