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I think an economic argument in support of free software would carry more weight coming from someone other than "OSNews publisher, ex-Red Hat employee David Adams."

Who better to argue the point than someone who's personally profited from the model? Not only does Red Hat do so, but Adams made a fair chunk of change from Open Source software by leading the team that developed Tallyman (later folded into Interchange) and getting the company bought by Red Hat. In the meanwhile, they made their money by selling services based around the package, which was open source.

In short, Adams has made the model work for him, which probably has a good deal to say about his qualifications regarding and enthusiasm for it.

Tim O'Reilly says the following (quote):
"16. Online Minivend Reference Guide "MiniVend -multi-catalog shopping cart and mall," March 14, 1997. Mike Heins, the creator of the MiniVend system (now owned by Red Hat under the name "Interchange") provided some great art. He showed us how to very easily configure his open-source system to perform single-click buying. In writing the system, he put considerable effort into saving customer session information, so that buyers would not have to reenter their information to make purchases.

However, the submission is not a winner, because we don't have evidence that someone made those simple changes and implemented 1-Click shopping in the proper fashion before our Prior To date." (end of quote)

The last sentence is, IMHO, really MORE THAN ANNOYING ! Not that I blame Tim O'Reilly for it, but I simply don't believe it.

I have been reading the minivend mailing list since it started out beginning of 1997. Mike Heins posted to his minivend mailing list as a response to someone who asked exactly for something that represents the implementation of the one-click ordering feature, that this feature CAN be implemented AND THAT IT HAS BEEN DONE. This was on May 13th, 1997 and clearly before the cut-off date of Sept. 27th, 1997.

Please read the short thread of the post on "Retaining user information" here

I am aware of the fact, that Mike Heins might have been under restrictions to release any more information of who had done it at that time, but obviously he knew so much, that he confidently could mention on the mailing list, that it "has been done". I can say, that what later became known as the "famous" one-click feature, was something that was an option to be implemented easily for a programmer who could understand the software, i.e. a person skilled in the trade, and users of MiniVend were aware of it. I am sure several people have thought and played with setting it up, but might not have gone through with it, because many customer didn't like it at that time. It was considered just too mysterious and considered not "slow and clear" enough.

But quite frankly I could very well imagine that in certain industries that feature might have been welcome and that it was implemented. I simply think that the ones, who did it, don't want to come forward for whatever reasons.

Now, may be it is really impossible to find the person or site, who implemented it and prove that it was done, but this is an appeal for whoever it was to COME FORWARD.

So, even if Tim O'Reilly throws the towel, that doesn't mean that the battle is lost.

Would be interesting to know if the site could be found and retrieved in the Alexa archive, which of course now is conveniently owned by Amazon.com itself. What a coincidence. For more on Alexa archives look here and here . The archives have now 16 terabytes of text, audio and graphical files, accumulated from April 1996 on.

Akopia, recently acquired by RedHat, developed Interchange, which is an awesome web development platform for e-commerce websites. It's GPL. I highly recommend you check it out at: http://developer.akopia.com

If you take a peek at Akopia, you will find a very robust, very well tested solution. They have changed their name since their initial product, as they merged with another company whose name escapes me.

I used their previous product and was extremely pleased, and when I relaunch our billing system in march, we will be using Akopia's system.

It has everything you are looking for, is open-source, AND has been tested by the masses over time.

What more could you want?

Minivend is very cool. It's a daemon that creates dynamic web pages (especially shopping carts) from databases. It's written completely in perl which allows it to access virtually any popular database thanks to perl/DBI. Also, LDAP support is currently being integrated.

Minivend is also very powerful. You can easily embed perl code direcly into a web page (ya I know you can do that with this-that-and-other.4.2 web package) but minivend also integrates that with a web based database editor and nearly every feature an ecommerce site would use. Things like automatic order routing, user accounts, integration with credit card verification services, support for discounts, coupons and quantity pricing, plus lots more (see the product info page).

Best of all, minivend is open source and will remain open source and will soon be merged with the tallyman site management interface.