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You make good points. However:

Hardware consistency, everyone is using the same system and that system runs the latest games for that platform perfectly, you can code to the limit, not the bare minimum.

I'm under the impression that a game engine designed for the asset budget of an indie game might not even fully stress the capability of the bare minimum. A couple of the screenshots in the article were of 2D games.

Assets are not the only things that are computationally expensive, there are plenty of AI, physics, shader effects, etc... that are beyond the scope of the bare minimum. And the obvious way to get around a distribution limit is to use the computational power to generate as many procedural assets as you can.

also the ability to use Kinect.

Windows 7 officially supports the Kinect sensor, and a subset of functionality (depth field, not automatic skeleton recognition) is available with third-party user-mode Kinect sensor drivers.

Yes i have seen there is a BETA version of the SDK recently made available. You can do it, but it's still sold as an XBox accessory, most consumers are using kinect with an XBox anyway.

compared to having to set up your own distribution and paywall system

Would something like osCommerce + Super Download Shop + PayPal/Google/Amazon payment work? Or perhaps your point is that the annual price of HTTPS hosting approaches the App Hub + Xbox Live Gold membership fee.

Yes obviously you can do it with a combination of other services, the point is you don't have to, it's all included.

Moreover, the fact that the XNA framework uses a programming language not common on non-Microsoft platforms (C#) limits portability of a game designed for XBLIG to other platforms.

You are suggesting targeting the PC but if multiple platforms is your goal then you know that by targeting XBLIG you get 90% of the PC gaming market that you are suggesting as the alternative anyway.

Or should one just plan on making entirely separate products for XBLIG vs. other platforms?

XBLIG + Windows7 vs other platforms, yes. Given that XBLIG + Windows 7 is the vast majority of the gaming market anyway, as hobbyist if you've targeted that then you're doing well.

Hardware consistency, everyone is using the same system and that system runs the latest games for that platform perfectly, you can code to the limit, not the bare minimum.

I'm under the impression that a game engine designed for the asset budget of an indie game might not even fully stress the capability of the bare minimum. A couple of the screenshots in the article were of 2D games.

also the ability to use Kinect.

Windows 7 officially supports the Kinect sensor, and a subset of functionality (depth field, not automatic skeleton recognition) is available with third-party user-mode Kinect sensor drivers.

compared to having to set up your own distribution and paywall system

Would something like osCommerce + Super Download Shop + PayPal/Google/Amazon payment work? Or perhaps your point is that the annual price of HTTPS hosting approaches the App Hub + Xbox Live Gold membership fee.

Moreover, the fact that the XNA framework uses a programming language not common on non-Microsoft platforms (C#) limits portability of a game designed for XBLIG to other platforms. I've been told that other .NET languages (e.g. IronPython) can't run in the XNA environment for various reasons, such as the lack of System.Reflection.Emit. Or should one just plan on making entirely separate products for XBLIG vs. other platforms?

Not sure what languages you know, you mention PHP and that is enough. There are plenty of PHP projects that some people vitally depend on, like OScommerce. Lots of things to improve there - the customer form seems non-American (no Zip Code), there are a number of almost necessary add-ons and adding them all on is a tough process etc. And many people depend on it. I also see PHP security issues for all kinds of PHP projects all of the time, something else to work on.

I know C decently, and had an interest in optical character recognition, and a few years back GOCR was the best free OCR out there. As I was unused to contributing to large C projects it took me a little bit to wrap my head around the program, but ultimately I didn't have to completely - some programs split up functionality so that one only has to understand parts. I tested GOCR against many scans, saw where it made a lot of errors and then worked to improve its functionality for those mis-scanned letters - ultimately I did a patch. The maintainer disappeared for a few months so I gave up on submitting it, but then he returned, I made noise about my patch and he submitted a modified version of it.

Around that time, Google released the tesseract OCR in C++. It is superior to GOCR, but I do not know C++ as well as C, and its data structures (based on the common and abstract dawg and trie type data structures) are more complex than GOCR's, I have not had the time to wrap my head around it to contribute.

After learning some Java in a class, I felt I had little real-world experience in it, so I just searched through the bug reports in the most popular Sourceforge Java projects. I picked a sort of uncomplicated project, and a bug which was not that incredibly complex (but was not simple) and fixed it up. My patch was accepted.

I also had a problem with one of my programs on Ubuntu and got involved with it. This program calls libraries, which call other libraries, which call other libraries. So the bug reporting is a little off - people report bugs all over the place (Ubuntu bug tracking, Red Hat bug tracking, Debian bug tracking), but they don't always make it to the right place - a lot of the bugs need to be kicked upstream to the library maintainers. One bug which is happening was introduced during a certain commit, I discovered where it happened and patched the problem, but they have not accepted my patch yet. I am trying to learn the library (and the library the library depends on) so as to commit a better patch. But just my help in maintaining the bug tracking systems and coordinating them is being a help - I close tickets and email people that their problems have been patched and so forth - I do grunt work the people who know the coding language and the programs well do not want to do, so even in that aspect I am helping. Although I am working to understand the programs as well as they do.

At least there is a fix posted. Protip to Anon Cow: No one likes trolls that post blind links.

Of course that totally ignores shipping modules available for OSCommerce such as tship I suppose you work for one of the proprietary firms??

I have checked that "Tesco" company trough a few links, and ended here:

http://www.tescodvdrental.com/visitor/browse.html? node_id=6111&parent_node_id=6095

Is that OsCommerce? because the Skin looks almost like OsCommerce. The urls dont look like OsCommerce, but anyway...

Example osCommerce:
http://demo.oscommerce.com/index.php?cPath=2

is there a standard in the accounting world?

But I know of osCommerce, which is a pretty popular storefront solution... and then if you do a custom solution, I have a PHP/MySQL database manager that can be used for the site's backend. Not sure how useful it would be for your site – I originally wrote it for MadTux, a Linux download site, and their needs are admittedly more than a little more specific than most sites would need – but may as well offer it if you have any use.

I care, but unfortunately certain browser developers don't give a rat's ass, so attempting to get a page to render perfectly in ALL major browsers without being ultra-conservative and without having to rely on browser hacks like quirks mode or conditional comments is not an easy task.

Furthermore, many open source projects generate HTML output that is so far from compliant that it's easier to just give up and rely on quirks and conditional comments to make things work, in comparison to spending the many man-weeks it would take to fix rendering problem of the various modules and plugins one would often use in conjunction with those projects.

"But I last used osCommerce back in it's [sic] 2.2 days "

Considering that 2.2 hasn't been released yet, that's quite an accomplishment. The most recent release was a patch on milestone 2 (of 4) of the 2.2 project: http://www.oscommerce.com/about/news,121

I'm setting up a webstore with osCommerce right now - I'm sorry to say that the annoyances you found are still around.

Not only is all the HTML deeply baked into the PHP code, it's quite crappy HTML as well. To be honest, the standard layout looks like utter crap and I pity anyone who uses it. Well, atleast if you don't have a fondness for the worst freeware clipart this planet has to offer. If you add plugins to the code you'll find yourself in a world of pain when a new version of osCommerce is released since you've modified some of the core files.

I've spent some serious time with the current version though, I've made it easier to implement different frameworks and to make it spit out better HTML, so as of now I'm pretty pleased with it. The next major release of it will actually have theme-support, finally!

Anyway, once you have osCommerce looking the way you want it it's actually quite nice, especially considering the price. There's some seriously nice plugins available to extend its capabilities aswell (modify quantity behavior, add support for payment solutions etc).

I'm setting up a webstore with osCommerce right now - I'm sorry to say that the annoyances you found are still around.

Not only is all the HTML deeply baked into the PHP code, it's quite crappy HTML as well. To be honest, the standard layout looks like utter crap and I pity anyone who uses it. Well, atleast if you don't have a fondness for the worst freeware clipart this planet has to offer. If you add plugins to the code you'll find yourself in a world of pain when a new version of osCommerce is released since you've modified some of the core files.

I've spent some serious time with the current version though, I've made it easier to implement different frameworks and to make it spit out better HTML, so as of now I'm pretty pleased with it. The next major release of it will actually have theme-support, finally!

Anyway, once you have osCommerce looking the way you want it it's actually quite nice, especially considering the price. There's some seriously nice plugins available to extend its capabilities aswell (modify quantity behavior, add support for payment solutions etc).

OsCommerce website

you can do this with OS Commerce open source online shopping cart.

You can create protected digital download store "items" and determine how many times they are able to download a give stock photo or whether it expires after a given amount of time.

Add credit card processing and you have a reasonably fully automated system.

e.

"farming out all the stuff that Amazon does" Farming out to whom? I can only assume you mean allowing authors to sell their products directly through their own online stores? Done
This however does not replace the service Amazon provides. At its core, yes Amazon is an online store, however it does much more than that. It makes recommendations to buyers through book reviews and by using empirical data to make recommendations to a consumer on what they may also be interested in. The system has saved me from buying many books that might have been a waste of money while allowing me to quickly research and locate the books containing the information I want. Why would I want to take a step backwards as a consumer and become less educated about the products I buy?

I have, however, been paid to customize an open-source software (namely osCommerce) to fit the very specific needs of a company, and gave some of the modifications back to the community, even though we didn't have to.

We've started a sponsorship program for the osCommerce project where our community members can make a financial contribution to the project and get back some additional benefits in return.

This increases ones awareness in our community otherwise only possible through making contributions available (development work) or being an active supporter in the community forums.

The finances gained from this are then put towards the fees involved in hosting such a project, organizing team meetings, and are also spread throughout the team when it is possible to do so. The important thing we keep in mind is to not provide a must-have feature for community sponsors, but to make it easier for them to do things also normal community members can achieve, and to always give back to the community when asking for something.

For the corporate side (partners), placing advertising banners throughout your site would also help, but obviously only when the advertising content is of use to your community!

Sometimes partners come to you, and sometimes you must go to them ;-)

We've started a sponsorship program for the osCommerce project where our community members can make a financial contribution to the project and get back some additional benefits in return.

This increases ones awareness in our community otherwise only possible through making contributions available (development work) or being an active supporter in the community forums.

The finances gained from this are then put towards the fees involved in hosting such a project, organizing team meetings, and are also spread throughout the team when it is possible to do so. The important thing we keep in mind is to not provide a must-have feature for community sponsors, but to make it easier for them to do things also normal community members can achieve, and to always give back to the community when asking for something.

For the corporate side (partners), placing advertising banners throughout your site would also help, but obviously only when the advertising content is of use to your community!

Sometimes partners come to you, and sometimes you must go to them ;-)

A9's is the easiest yet. You don't have to register for any special account or get permission. You just go to the submission page, give them the URL of your site description, and they validate it (as well as your sample search), giving you a preview.

The XML itself is a few simple extra tags to your RSS 2.0-compliant feed. If you already have a site search engine (like this one) it takes a few minutes to add an XML output option.

Once you get it working, it's immediately available as an a9.com column. It's that simple.

Incidentally, at IMVU, we use a customized version of the open-source osCommerce package. It'd be pretty neat if OpenSearch came standard on projects like this.

Umm...huh? Credit card's aren't stored in the DB (they're handeled by PayPal). Also, how is PostreSQL or whatever more secure than MySQL? I mean, osCommerce uses MySQL, as well as many other shopping cart systems. How would you like your order processing information stored? Flat-file? Also, often ecommerce orders are sent to various email addresses (ever received an order confirmation?). That email was sent unencrypted, in plain-text! That means that anyone listening on your network could in theory intercept your email and get your mailing/billing address.
So, answer me: Why does MySQL suck for storing order information, and what do you suggest storeing the info in instead?

My favorite is: Open Source E-Commerce.

Why someone would want to write their own shopping cart is beyond me... as someone who does just that full-time *cough*UltraCart*cough*, I can tell you that proper e-commerce implementation & security is hard. Even beyond the traditional web application security issues, running a shopping cart is like placing a large shooting target squarely on your website.

Also, usability is a large factor. Unless you're Jakob Nielsen, you are likely to overlook some design choices that will result in lost sales and lost opportunity. Unfortuantely, all too often the person writing the card is not the one that should be doing the site design.

If you don't want to spend the money for a hosted or installed cart, there are some free / OSS alternatives such as ZenCart or OSCommerce.

The bottom line is that most stores don't need the hassle, cost, and complexity of a custom cart solution. Remember to look at total cost of ownership.

As someone who works exclusively with e-commerce support and has seen a number of clients' store data, the situation generally ranges from frustratingly bad to comic ineptitude.

Was troubleshooting a client's osCommerce store to see if we could encrypt and decrypt credit card numbers and return them securely. OSC has a MySQL backend, so to make this a bit easier, I suggested he install phpMyAdmin.

"Oh, don't worry," he said, "we've already got it installed at www.mywebsite.com/phpMyAdmin."

When I went to the page, phpMA had been installed in "config" security - ie, any master of reverse-engineering that could guess he might have a folder called "phpMyAdmin" could see ALL of his tables and had root privileges on his store database.

Stupid.

Most end-users know little about protecting data and are only now starting to wise up because credit card fraud is RAMPANT and the card companies are complaining (and actually enforcing some new protection standards). I believe Visa/MC will start requiring at least RSA encryption of credit card data if customer information is stored on a publicly-accessible server.

Then there was the guy whose entire site was a group of perl scripts and whose "Checkout" script handled credit card information by setting - guess what? - COOKIES, with the full cc# and personal data available to anyone who would read the client cookie. No cookie domain, just raw cookies with plain unencrypted data.

It's a mystery to me that more people aren't blatantly ripped off, but thankfully, commercial hosts seem to be reasonably knowledgable about this and are taking appropriate precautions.

I'm really shocked that no one has yet mentioned OSCommerce.

You are right that marketing is a huge intellectual challenge.

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Government data compares Democrat and Republican economics.

I can't count the times that I see this "cool script" out there that does this "awesome thing". Then, I take a look at it, the entire thing is a hack job,

Case in point. This cool, much reviewed open source e-commerce app:

http://www.oscommerce.com/

... depends on having register_globals turned on. After all the publicity surrounding this security liability!

Sure they do.

For an open source web shop check out osCommerce. We use it at work to run two online shops. It uses a MySQL backend and has an active community supporting it.

--

However, the good reviews still pour in from GameZone and Ferrago.

I heard about this game about a month ago. Since that time, I can't fathom how much this game has endeared itself to me. As soon as I saw the lack of a good community website, I began to build one with the help of another community member with the same idea. Then I built a non-profit card store to help further the game, using osCommerce, located at scfans.net, though there are other resellers on the books, such as Gameguys and IBK, to be completely fair.

The bottom line is, in terms of pure gameplay fun, excitement, and community involvement (the developer, Paul aka Merakon, is on almost every evening, and his support in getting SCWatch.net up and running has been stellar to say the least.

If you dig a good strategy game, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

TEP is "The Exchange Project", now known as osCommerce.

there is a nice copyright at the bottom of the page, and the ENTIRE site is ripped straight from oscommerce.com

hmm WAY TO GO...

Whose API charges beacoup fees, and makes it pretty much impossible to, say, write an open source shopping cart that'll sync with Ebay auctions (for the 10-50,000 people that sell on ebay and our own sites and might want to keep track of stock).

They (meaning idiot analysts for the most part) always say the real battle is between Ebay and Amazon for the future of online commerce. Amazon's got the right idea here, at least when it comes to getting their brand out free. Too bad it costs so much to list...

Enhydra for the Java set is good, or Ariadne for the PHP crowd is decent. For those doing a shopping-cart Interchange or osCommerce is nice. If one's running a RPM distribution get cpan2rpm as well.

What is osCommerce? Yes, I can guess, but I would like to be told definitively.

"Adonis the faker"? Is this an elaborate joke?

osCommerce looks great! This is what the world needs, in my opinion, a standard method, so people don't have to invent their own. This is the first time I've seen it, so thank you nandix and Slashdot.

However, the osCommerce documentation and source sites are disorganized enough that it seems like osCommerce is not ready for wide use. For example, the documentation project site calls the software by a different name than the software site: OSCommerce vs. osCommerce.

OSCommerce 2.2CVS Documentation

OSCommerce 2.2CVS Pretend product catalog

Short description: About osCommerce

830 sites use osCommerce, and are registered.

osCommerce looks great! This is what the world needs, in my opinion, a standard method, so people don't have to invent their own. This is the first time I've seen it, so thank you nandix and Slashdot.

However, the osCommerce documentation and source sites are disorganized enough that it seems like osCommerce is not ready for wide use. For example, the documentation project site calls the software by a different name than the software site: OSCommerce vs. osCommerce.

OSCommerce 2.2CVS Documentation

OSCommerce 2.2CVS Pretend product catalog

Short description: About osCommerce

830 sites use osCommerce, and are registered.

osCommerce looks great! This is what the world needs, in my opinion, a standard method, so people don't have to invent their own. This is the first time I've seen it, so thank you nandix and Slashdot.

However, the osCommerce documentation and source sites are disorganized enough that it seems like osCommerce is not ready for wide use. For example, the documentation project site calls the software by a different name than the software site: OSCommerce vs. osCommerce.

OSCommerce 2.2CVS Documentation

OSCommerce 2.2CVS Pretend product catalog

Short description: About osCommerce

830 sites use osCommerce, and are registered.

oscommerce.

Formelly The Exchange Project. Good stuff.

Lik-Sang are using our OpenSource eCommerce solution called osCommerce (shameless plug, I know).

They were always one of our best refernces. Dammit.

I have read some posts and i am specially agree with the ones speaks about... sell solutions, not software, find a place in the market not yet explored or infraexplored, is posible to make money with free software and is not necesary to create some new, you can focus in something already created and specializate on it.

Joining all this ideas, a concrete idea come to my mind is that you could be the interface between some companies now are out the net, (perhaps small companies, but that have something to sell, and that things are things people could buy in the net), and the net.

I talking about companies that even not have a computer. You could give them a complete solution to sell their products in the net using, by example, oscommerce. The petitions of the customers could reach them across short message in movil phone, (if they have not a computer and dont want to know nothing about computers).

I think the inversion for this is almost zero $, (you can start this with your computer in your room, if you have broadband). Almost the only cost will be your time.