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Open Source E-commerce Engine Announced
Paul Carlstrom wrote to let us know that Idealab! has unveiled its first Linux venture: an open source e-commerce engine, called OpenSales. Runs on Linux, Solaris, UNIX and WinNT, and VA Linux Systems will be bundling it with some servers later this year. This will be interesting to see how they and Magic-SW, the makers of a Linux e-commerce engine will make out - and creds to Magic for donating 10k to save penguins. They have also vowed to not use live penguins anymore in promotion of their products.
(This from tomorrow's LWN)
Jonathan Corbet, LWN.net
open source continues to climb up the value chain...
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
anyways, now that i've got a fairly high up spot.. heh heh..
what i really wanted to say was that it's nice that magic-sw donated the 10k... I was really wondering at LWCE what they were doing regarding that.
wild animals, in captivity or not, shouldn't be media promoters. period.
Wow, live-penguin-powered e-commerce solutions! I just hope they have them powering the system by running on a treadmill, not by, er... spontaneous penguin combustion.
burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
I realize it was completely irrelevant, but the temptation was too strong, I couldn't resist... while I'm here, I'll go ahead and say that available open source products are diversifying so, one day, if I ever put my computer to some productive use, I'll hopefully be bale to run an entire company/website open sourcified :-)
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
Yes, I agree that the 10k is quite a nice gesture, but I think even more important is the public, calm way in which they handled everything. They let people knew they heard them, then they did what was right. It's nice to know that a company is listening.
burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
Also, am I just retarded in not being able to figure out how to post a top level reply to a story? I am looking at the story in nested mode with a threshold of 0.
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
So what if they wrote it with NetObjects Fusion for Windows?
The site runs on Linux.
Remember, they have to have machines with all those OSes on them so that they can make sure their product compiles and runs on all of them. The web page author just happens to have a Windows machine.
As long as it doesn't crash my browser or system, I could care less what they wrote it with.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
As a newly born independent conslutant (er, consultant), I am working on an e-commerce system for my client. I am _very_ interested in helping develop a serious, high - end open source e-commerce system.
By e-commerce system, I don't mean "shopping cart" w/a pretty front end either. I mean something full of real commerce functionality, like:
* interfaces for fulfillment processing
* interfaces for inventory data sharing with other applications (probably legacy, in many cases)
* interfaces for tracking shipping info.
* either the ability to integrate with a good dynamic content system or have a good dynamic content system embedded in it
* ability to dynamically modify product attributes and generate groupings of products on the fly
* interfaces for credit card authorization and sales tax calculations
* interfaces for customer service stuff
I have subscribed to the MiniVend users list, but haven't had a chance to read any of it.
I'm working with a Java servlet based commercial product which does quite a bit of stuff (all the stuff I listed above, but more - well, eventually, after they finish writing it!) and I would love to help bring an open source equivalent to the forefront.
Anyone have any thoughts on which of the existing open source e-commerce solutions is robust enough to handle a major enterprise's e-commerce needs?
I went to the e-commerce BOF at the Open Source conference but it sucked so badly, I didn't hear about any of the existing OS e-commerce applications. If I think I'm reading the market right, there is some crazy good potential for an open source solution here.
If anyone wants to discuss high end e-commerce solutions from the open source point of view, please feel free to get in touch with me. My goal is to be able to work on e-commerce applications which are primarily, if not solely, based on open source technologies.
Wes Gamble
Bison Consulting
Houston, TX
weyus@att.net
Anyone notice that there doesn't seem to be a link to either BUY or download the stuff. My company is currently running OpenSite on NT for one of our customers, it dies often enough that I had to set a monitor to page me every time it went down so I could stop the IIS service and restart it, sometimes quite often. Totally closed source auction, actual .exe files. My boss doesn't seem to trust open source, even though the Linux box I built "for fun" has run for months without an unplanned reboot. OpenSite is for auctions, but I'm sure that with source, we could modify this for our own means. Just show me where to get it!
I like music
e-barter.. Now that's a damn good idea...
Need some program documentation written but you're cash-strapped? Trade off one of your used Alphas.
Need a faster chip? Spend a few hours troubleshooting an intermittant network for someone with boxes full.
Need someone to debug your latest failure? Trade off with the fellow that needs an opinion on his database trouble.
I think this could actually catch on! It would definitly benefit those who need a little extra somthing this month (like a new Palm) but have neither the cash or ambition to find a second job, and it would reduce cash-strain on all parties.
I also must note that it kind of follows a great ideal: Help your neighbor with what he need, and he will reciprocate.
(thinks of implementing such a monster)
.sig: Now legally binding!
Mmmm, pretty nice.
As with Zope, this looks like a perfectly fine product that may well be usable for some very good high-volume systems. But as with Zope, it's also a latecomer to a field of products that are on their way out.
This sounds similar in developer feng shui to Intershop: all-in-one sitebuilding system, based on Perl, built for quick setup or involved customization.
Thing is, as Zope's creators can tell you of their Storyserver-cousin, and as Groupe Bull can tell you of their low-end EJB app server, sometimes you realize you're trailing the market and the only things you can do are close up shop and call it a day, or give away the product and sell support and consulting.
Nowadays, the hot technologies in three-tier high end sites are EJB+JSP app servers and/or the ASP+COM combo. In (mostly two-tier) smaller projects, the cresting environments are PHP and Cold Fusion.
I did some looking around, and I'm convinced now that a high-end EJB + CORBA + JSP app server comparable to a Weblogic, Dynamo, Websphere, etc. can be built out of parts with GPL, BSD, and similar licenses. It mostly looks like a matter of choosing a baseline set of components and writing glue scripts to facilitate install and configuration of the critter.
Minivend is licensed under the GPL.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
Looks interesting, but strangley no code and no mention of GPL, Apache, BSD or similar license. It looks snazzy but I don't see anything.
Also I'd like to know how this application differs from Minivend, besides better graphics on the website. Minivend has been in development for over 3 years and seems well suited for e-commerce. Plus it's very configurable and allows for many different backends.
I'd also like to know how easily this will migrate into the GNU Enterprise project down the road. It will be really interesting if this project is a GPL'd Enterprise level e-commerce system. I'll definately get my hands dirty in that.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
I'm curious to know the extent of any payments methods that may be implemented into the system. Now would be a perfect time to look into the open specifications for OFX. OFX is still relatively new, but it's XML-style approach to secure financial exchanges would be an excellent approach toward lowering the costs of the more "difficult" areas of e-commerce.
As soon as you're born you start dying
One basic requirement for open source you should have source available.
These guys don't have source code available, either for sale or for free, and have the words 'patent' and 'trademark' strewn about. There is no license, and no indication that there is actually anything really there but a bunch of buzzwords.
The one thing worse than people playing buzzword-of-the-day with the "Open Source" trump card is people playing the Microsoftesque "Vaporware" game with Open Source projects.
I'm afraid that we might jumping the gun here. There is no concrete evidence that this product is indeed open source, much less that it will comply with the (thankfully) strict 'Open Source' definition found at OpenSource.org.
right, but my comment was really aimed at their marketing of the product.. the site is all screwed up in both NT and Mac browsers.
A company called ExOffice (www.exoffice.com) is pretty far along in this. Their product will be called Intalio. Contains all you mentioned plus a little bit of an XML development environment. --JRZ
this would be great news for small business owners , but Amazon.com announced today that they are going to let people use their servers for e-commerce for only $10 a month and %2 of sales. This is way less than buying a dedicated server (even a celeron) and a cheaper ADSL or cable ISP. Once my sales go up that the %2 means over $100 a month I will definatly look into this...
One of the elements of their system is its "patented cluster technology." I suspect that this is intended to address the need for rapid scalability--the Achilles' heel of many e-commerce systems. There is always a point where it is impossible to scale by simply adding boxes. (For some systems this occurs for any N>1, while most others stop scaling at a "few".) A nice trick if they've managed to solve this one... But a patent? They aren't going to get many takers in the open-source crowd with that kind of strategy. In fact, even if they've produced a wonderful system apart from this clustering technology, and somehow manage to GPL all but that one piece of it, I think most folks here would consider it tainted and stay far away.
Just what were they thinking?
OFX which is an SGML standard is being XMLized to IFX. The IFX project is a derivative of both OFX and Gold. The OFX Consortium has no plans to further enhance OFX. It looks like IFX is now being implemented as a DTD and perhaps later as a Schema.
Hope this helps!
I was just checking out the site..
I put THE STARRY NIGHT, Van Gogh in my basket...
@ $20,000,000.00
Then, I put a quantity of 2 for it. ( I wanted to see if it really is one of a kind! )
MiniVend retotaled it to 2 X $400... for a total
of $800.00
Quite a sale for two of them.... It suppose this
is what you get for writing it in Perl.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
a poor attempt at humor if you ask me..
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Having talked with my VA linux rep and after talking with Michelle Krauss at the Open Source conference here are the basics on Open Sales.
1. The product is real. I got a very nice demo of the system working at Linuxworld and it appears to work. This is a good thing since shopping carts really aren't that hard to do.
2. It hasn't been released yet and there is no word on when it will be released. I have heard that a pre-release version might be available in a week or two or three. (This number seems to grow every time I ask about it.)
3. Essentially the business model is give the e-commerce software away and then sell things like the Affiliates program, Pick pack and ship and inventory management. Apparently the cluster management software will be sold as well. So you get a really useful content management, and e-commerce solution and can buy modules for it.
4. The license is the most difficult part of the software because no one has seen it. It has not been posted to the open source license discussion groups and Michelle said that members of the open source community were looking at the license. ESR had not seen it when I asked him about it, and I haven't asked Bruce Perens. I am pretty sure they haven't run it by Stallman tho. What was said at the Open Source Conference was that it WILL NOT be GPLed. The license according to Michelle has a flavor similar to the Mozilla license (which I consider a failure of a license). Apparently the GPL is too restrictive (in that it forces you to be free) and the BSD license is too free (it allows easier entrance by a competitor). It was indicated at the Open Source conference that it is still being re-written by the legal department. This is the most worrisome thing about this project. It would seem to me that any open source product that is not using a standard open source license should be discussed in the community and not sprung on the community. The idea that license is still in legal after all this time is really worrisome.
5. I have to admit that my company is coming out with a similar product using the BSD license. We haven't built a "Coming Soon" site like Open Sales since we would like to have all the documentation and the various other elements of an open source community project (CVS, Mailing lists, and Jitterbug among other things) as well as the code available. We have built 28 or so e-commerce sites with our software over the past eighteen months with the software. It deploys a site fairly quickly with a similar set of proposed features of Open Sales. A list of sites built with the code we will be open sourcing is found here.
My CTO believes you should launch an actual system as opposed to "pressware." So in the next month or so we should actually launch. You can send me mail if you want to be notified when we launch.
This is an Idealabs company so they have had a number of notable successes in the past such as Citysearch, Goto,NetZero and Etoys. They have also have had some failures such ewallet. They have quite a few resources so they can try some new and experimental ideas.
Thalasar
On a slightly related note, does anyone know of a Canadian incarnation of Idealab! or something similar? Such a great idea shouldn't be wasted on the US alone ;)
I guess the company had to donate that $10K to stop all those green morons who don't understand the coolness of bringing penguins to the SJ convention center and begin to terrorize the great company for no apparent reason. I generally don't mind the environmentalists too much, but what's so bad about letting people take pictures with penguins?!
-- The word "woman" is not politically correct any longer.
The word "woman" is no longer politically correct.
You should use "Female-American" instead.
E-barter is a great idea, and I would love to have that and have even been thinking in that direction for some time. Unfortunately, it is impossible on a reasonably large scale, for a very simple reason - once this becomes big and coordinated and many people do that, the government (don't we all love it?) will realize that no taxes is being paid, and will therefore prohibit this stuff. I would be happy to write you a patch in 2-3 hours and get a cool gadget in return, but The Government will lose something like $50 in taxes if we do that, and they will NEVER let that happen.
-- The word "woman" is not politically correct any longer.
The word "woman" is no longer politically correct.
You should use "Female-American" instead.
It depends on your size. If you are a small company and sell brand-less widgets, zShops under Amazon are perfect for you (well, in 90% of the cases).
However, once you reach a reasonably large size and begin to care about you own name, this won't be enough anymore. Suppose Panasonic wants to set up a new online store - would they be better off putting it under Amazon, or spending some ridiculously low (compared to their volume) amount of money and getting their own system with their brand on it?
-- The word "woman" is not politically correct any longer.
The word "woman" is no longer politically correct.
You should use "Female-American" instead.
Of course, if a web page crashes your browser, you have a problem with Netscape. And if it crashes your OS, you have a problem with IE. :)
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
What attributes of an EJB server make it high or low end?
For instance, what makes Bulls EJB low end?
Is Oracle's EJB server in 8i high end? (aside from it not doing entity beans AFAIK)
I have discovered a wonderful
No one is complaining that people want to take pictures with penguins. (AFAIK anyway.) The problem is that the penguins are brought into a huge bustling conference hall full of light and noise, housed in tiny sparse cages, and generally not treated with the respect they deserve as cute creatures. Besides, if they have enough money to help environmental causes, more power to them.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
I might as well continue the trend of being the only person to respond to my posts with this:
Apparently, in my haste, I did not contemplate all the bad karma that achieving this "first post" would generate. I'm begining to feel quite inferior, and I was wondering how I could counteract this... Hopefully this won't just knock me down another notch like all my other posts did...
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
I don't really think our Big Brother in Washington can have a whole lot to say about it. In the situation you gave, the government loses no money. Sales tax was paid when the gadget was purchased, and cannot be re-charged if I were to sell it to you. Also, the government does not recieve a smaller slice of income tax, because I purchased the gizmo with money earned and taxed. If you had not written the patch for me, I would have had to do it myself (at salary). Besides, how can the government actually expect to tax a non-contractual agreement between friends? ;-)
.sig: Now legally binding!
So... maybe. Or is this just another "call it open and sucker people into working on your project" scam?
http://www.enhydra.com
I saw a presentation/demo of Open Sales at Caltech in June, where Bill Gross & company were all hot about launching in July. I later on bumped into their CTO (who was also CTO of etoys, interestingly enough), and he claimed that their lawyers were still working out the licenses. Now I have been monitoring their web site for a good while now and I have yet to see anything new, so I'm not sure why this is slashdot-worthy news.
Actually barter is taxable. Everytime you barter you have to report it and pay taxes on it. Of course nobody actually does this but if the IRS ever decided to enforce this law they could tag everybody in the US.
War is necrophilia.
I spent quiet a bit of time installing and getting to understand minivend... I was in the end very frustrated with how slow the thing was. Looking at it again, it would of been a very - similar learning curve w/just learning to use PHP.
After learning PHP, you have a lot of different shopping cart libs to do the same thing.
PHP/Coldfusion would make much more sense in the long run, and in reality is easier.
If you'd like to plan for high availability what is the best way to go as far as SSL certficates? If you have a central re-director machine, each of the clients needs to have their own SSL certficate right? What do people typically do here, use a transparent redirection mechanism, or buy more certficates? Any info would be greatly appreachiated.
-- Virtual Windows Project
I'm currently working on CommerceServ, another open-source e-commerce system. It's a little on hold right at the moment because of coursework, but I hope to get back to it within a few days.
More info at:
http://wired.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/ ~rnicoll/commerceserv/.
Enjoy!
The IIS-ASP-COM combo may not be a perfect world, especially at the MTS layer, but you can't say it isn't usable at the high end. I'm sure Dell, barnesandnoble.com and the major MSN affiliates would be surprised to hear that you can't build some typical types of high-volume dynamic sites with it.
Sure, the range of scaling, clustering and load-balancing approaches you can take are constrained and sometimes not pretty, but that's not the same as saying there aren't any. And presenting a seamless 24/7 face to the world may require more sweat, but there are sites that manage it, give or take a few multi-hour outages (salve Web TurboTax).
No, I probably wouldn't do a 100%-Microsoft realtime airline ticketing system, or something involving terabytes of filesystem storgae (read: Hotmail). Nor would I recommend it to a company that sets very high uptime requirements, or to any company that doesn't already have a very high NT committment in place. But even though it invites some headaches, a shop that has a heavy investment in NT infrastructure and skills and nothing on the Unix side can often do what it needs with the MS approach, as long as you understand there are brick walls you will run into if you try to do certain things.
[N.B.: Yes, I know much of Web Turbotax was built largely out of ISAPI DLLs, not so much with ASP and MTS.. but the most notorious outage they had was elsewhere.]
This new software sounds nice but if you need a true open-source e-commerce solution now then Minivend is what you want to use. There have been some comments about Minivend being slow but I know that Minivend runs some VERY heavily hit sites. If setup properly Minivend is VERY fast, the bottlenecks are usually elsewhere. Also, Minivend is about to get a MAJOR upgrade (version 4) that will make it faster and more straight-forward. Minivend is proven and available now in GPLed perl.
The Working Dogs crew has a nice ecomm engine called FreeTrade. It's coded in PHP and uses MySQL. A servlets version is planned. The license is BSD-style.
With Linux getting to be bigger business all the time, and companies promising not to use live penguins for promotional purposes, I wonder if there is money to be made in running a DEAD penguin concession? Venture capital anybody?
I've been working with Michelle Kraus of OpenSales as a member of the free software community in reviewing their license, and am familiar with it and the status of the product.
Suffice to say, both exist, there should be further announcements in October, and we hope the open source and free software communities are thrilled to pieces.
The product is has its roots in the eCommerce engine driving eToys. There are currently six clients, the code base is mature, and the first public release is meant to be production-level, usable code.
The OpenMerchant Community Source License is still being hammered out, there should only be minor changes in details remaining to be changed. It is similar in spirit to the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) -- it should meet the FSF's definition of Copyleft, and should be compliant with the Open Source Definition (OSD) by the Open Source Initiative. It provides specific additional protections for patent and trademark which aren't addressed in the GPL or LGPL.
The following is an interpretation of the license, but not a legal description of it, naturally.
The OpenMerchant Community Source License allows all licensees to use, reproduce, modify, perform, sublicense, distribute, and transmit the licensed work. Other contributors retain copyright to their code but grant license to use modifications under terms of the license. It allows the work to be incorporated into larger works, but requires that all modules, interface definition files, compile and install code, or diffs be considered part of the covered work.
The primary differences from the GNU licenses are extended language on other forms of intellectual property. Necessary grantable patent rights are granted by both the original developer and subsequent modifiers. Use of trademarks of developers is not granted (but you don't have to strip them from the code if they exist there). The original developer reserves the right to distribute its own code (but not contributed modifications) under other terms (a right granted anyway under law, but reported as a good-faith and statement of intent matter).
Distribution of modifications is addressed. These are similar to the [L]GPL, though distinctions between research and commercial use are made. The language tidies up issues now facing the GPL such as use of software on servers -- this is considered commercial, and requires distribution of modificiations. Language similar to the IBM Public License (IPSL, which covers Jikes) and the Netscape Public License (NPL) regarding third party legal claims. Licensee rights to enforce -- any licensee may enforce obligations of the license, though they can't drag other licensees into the fight.
License versioning is similar to GPL, IPSL, NPL, and others -- software may be licensed under the current or future versions of the license.
The termination language includes specific protection against patent infringement claims by licensees, which I think is particularly clever and effective. IBM has also developed some interesting twists which might be reviewed for comparison.
There are the typical disclaimers of liability and warrantee for free software.
Additional language pertains to government use, terms of interpretation and enforcement, jurisdiction, etc.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
You might be interested in checking out ecTechWeb which is a directory of news, information and internet resources of interest to developers and researchers relevant to electronic commerce. It's maintained by UMBC's Institute for Global Electronic Commerce