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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
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
So... maybe. Or is this just another "call it open and sucker people into working on your project" scam?
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.]