I am not an idiot and have already purchased a closed source solution. People are reading in to that my business plan is to wait for my POS to come to fruition. I am merely trying to minimize this expense for other new businesses and provide a clear, focused effort. This would be a separate, autonomous nonprofit entity.
I am not looking to earn money from this or open source. This would be a separate 501c3 foundation like Apache. This corporation would be completely separate and autonomous from my business except for the funding.
I planned to just have POS functions at first. Scan/input items, calculate total and tax, eject cash drawer, save/update sales records. I would want the businesses using this system to be able to have sales reports/data in the most open format so the can import that information into what ever accounting software they used.
In the future I would like to add backoffice functions like accounting but keep everything as module as I can. If people want to use Quickbooks they have that option. However I would like to try to have the POS interface with as many GPL applications as I could to mitigate costs for small business.
The title sounds like I want to just do this to save on my own costs, which is not true.
"In terms of opportunity cost, you'll likely spend that same $2-5k making a custom solution."
The $2-$5k quote is the average per terminal that I kept getting back from requests, not including backoffice functions and other additions I needed. I have already purchased a closed source solution ($xxk+) since I don't feel like running alpha code in a business environment. However, I would like to mitigate these costs for new businesses to get set up and running similar to what Apache has done for web servers.
I would keep paid developers throughout the project and any support as needed. $2-5K is not the final amount I wanted to contribute, but just the beginning which is why I asked whether I should start from scratch vs seeding another GPL project. This isn't part of my business model or strategy. I am planning to create a separate 501c3 corporation to handle this and provide the majority of initial funding. 5-10 years out I would like to see it self supported through membership fees, tax-exempt donations, grants, or association supported, again similar to how Apache is set up.
I'm aware of the challenges of getting businesses to even consider GPL based solutions. I'm not looking to go after large scale POS solutions but would like to provide the foundation for stability, scalability, and cost efficient solution for the future.
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I am not an idiot and have already purchased a closed source solution. People are reading in to that my business plan is to wait for my POS to come to fruition. I am merely trying to minimize this expense for other new businesses and provide a clear, focused effort. This would be a separate, autonomous nonprofit entity.
I am not looking to earn money from this or open source. This would be a separate 501c3 foundation like Apache. This corporation would be completely separate and autonomous from my business except for the funding.
I planned to just have POS functions at first. Scan/input items, calculate total and tax, eject cash drawer, save/update sales records. I would want the businesses using this system to be able to have sales reports/data in the most open format so the can import that information into what ever accounting software they used.
In the future I would like to add backoffice functions like accounting but keep everything as module as I can. If people want to use Quickbooks they have that option. However I would like to try to have the POS interface with as many GPL applications as I could to mitigate costs for small business.
I've found quite a few thermal receipt printers that offer linux drivers and they have documentation on how to get it working with CUPS.
The title sounds like I want to just do this to save on my own costs, which is not true.
"In terms of opportunity cost, you'll likely spend that same $2-5k making a custom solution."
The $2-$5k quote is the average per terminal that I kept getting back from requests, not including backoffice functions and other additions I needed. I have already purchased a closed source solution ($xxk+) since I don't feel like running alpha code in a business environment. However, I would like to mitigate these costs for new businesses to get set up and running similar to what Apache has done for web servers.
I would keep paid developers throughout the project and any support as needed. $2-5K is not the final amount I wanted to contribute, but just the beginning which is why I asked whether I should start from scratch vs seeding another GPL project. This isn't part of my business model or strategy. I am planning to create a separate 501c3 corporation to handle this and provide the majority of initial funding. 5-10 years out I would like to see it self supported through membership fees, tax-exempt donations, grants, or association supported, again similar to how Apache is set up.
I'm aware of the challenges of getting businesses to even consider GPL based solutions. I'm not looking to go after large scale POS solutions but would like to provide the foundation for stability, scalability, and cost efficient solution for the future.
Something along the lines of what I was thinking: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=319387&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20872645