Open Source Billing Solutions?

antis0c writes: "I am in the process of starting up an ISP, and I've been trying to find some really good Open Source Billing Software. I've looked around quite a bit, and the only truly Open Source solution I found was Freeside. It seems to offer a lot of what I need; Real-time credit card processing, MySQL database backend, Radius and Apache support, and all the general account management things you expect, but the user interface really leaves much to be desired. It doesn't feel very secure at all as it uses a lot of suid scripts and suEXEC in Apache and it also requires a lot of 3rd party Perl Modules (21 to be exact) which getting them all to work properly in conjunction with Freeside seems like a harder task than jumping through hoops of fire. My question is, what kinds of Billing Software have you guys used, and [what are] your good/bad experiences with it?"

Billing software and a lot of other infrastructural nitty-gritty is probably keeping a lot of businesses from switching to the joys of Open Source software for their backend. And if it requires 21 3rd-party modules to make Freeside work well, wouldn't some bright soul like to sell the work of neatly packaging those modules back to Freeside, so all will benefit from them? It would certainly make a nice diagram in the to-be-written textbook The Economics of Open Source Software.

Comments

Oxymoron

[CaptainZapp]

Sorry, but when I read Real time credit card processing in the same sentence as MySQL backend it gives me the jitters.

Now, before you folks unpack your baseball bats and woodoo dolls. This is not an attempt to degrade MySQL, but it's transaction processing capabilities are in beta at best, and I wouldn't consider it a proven enough platform to handle any financial transactions.

That doesn't discredit it's qualities as a proven backend for retrieval mostly databases which are not mission critical.

You may want to look into PostgreSQL for a transaction capable open source db.

duck & cover

Freeside Solutions

[CyberKnet]

I'm not sure if the reader in question actually realised this, but SISD do offer commercial services. Yes, you have to pay for them. They include preconfigured machines, installation, customization and training. The webpage to said commercial services can be found here. If freeside is ugly to you, ask them to customize it. If you cant get freeside to install, get them to. If you dont have to pay $$$ to buy the software, then there will be room in your budget for this, wouldnt there?

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