Open Source E-commerce Engine Announced 74
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.
There's Yams too (Score:5)
(This from tomorrow's LWN)
value chain (Score:1)
Re:first post and penguin opinion (Score:1)
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.
novel idea! (Score:1)
Re:There's Yams too (Score:1)
Re:first post and penguin opinion (Score:1)
Garbled (Score:1)
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.
Re:nifty idea, screwed up web site (Score:1)
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.
This is great news!!! (Score:4)
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
but HOW to get it? (Score:3)
Re:but HOW to get it? (Score:2)
You have to leave your email address for the source code.
E-barter (Score:2)
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)
sometimes open source just means unsellable (Score:2)
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 (Score:4)
Minivend is licensed under the GPL [gnu.org].
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]
Re:but HOW to get it? (Score:1)
Where's the License? (Score:2)
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.
Re:This is great news!!! (Score:1)
Re:sometimes open source just means unsellable (Score:2)
Payment methods (Score:2)
Not Open Source (Score:2)
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.
OSS EJB app server (Score:1)
This would be exciting... (Score:3)
Lets say I'm a merchant... (Score:1)
Sort of open-source (Score:2)
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?
Re:Garbled (Score:1)
CY
Bug w/ Minivend... (Score:1)
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.
Silly me.. this is a feature. (Score:1)
The Real Story on Open Sales. (Score:2)
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. [bravenewworlds.com]
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 [mailto] 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.
Re:E-barter (Score:1)
This feels pretty ass-backwards.
Money is simply a way of fairly assigning value to the work one does, or the products one produces.
Also, money has been in electronic form for a long time, making it easy to throw around on the net. If you start bartering, you'll have to ship things to people, etc. Very uninternet like.
Of course, you could simply barter services. But the whole problem with assigning value to the code someone produces, is that it's difficult to determine whether a small amount of code has any value, or that a particular coders efforts will be worthwhile after all. This is, of course, one of the reaons why we have the open source model...
-Snoot
Re:Sort of open-source (Score:2)
"Patent X44236845kj is freely licensed for use in any piece of software which is covered by the GNU Public License. Any entity wishing to license the patent for use in a non-GPL piece of software should contact the patent holder for pricing."
Then the GPL'ed software serves as a great proof-of-concept, as well as a roadmap of how to implement the concept in a real system.
Not that I expect them to do this, but it would be an interesting decision.
--JRZ
Re:Bug w/ Minivend... (Score:1)
Remember, an original costs more!
Part No: 00-0011
1 - $50,000,000.00
2 - $1,000.00
5 - $1,000.00
10 - $1,000.00
25 - $500.00
This "don't touch penguins" people drive me nuts! (Score:1)
-- The word "woman" is not politically correct any longer.
E-barter is good, but don't forget Uncle Sam..... (Score:1)
-- The word "woman" is not politically correct any longer.
Depends on your size (Score:1)
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.
Re:nifty idea, screwed up web site (Score:2)
Re:E-barter (Score:2)
EJB servers, high end and low end? (Score:1)
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)
OT: penguin treatment (Score:2)
Re:E-barter is good, but don't forget Uncle Sam... (Score:1)
Re:sometimes open source just means unsellable (Score:4)
OK...the EJP/JSP stuff I can see, but ASP/COM for high-end stuff? I just can't imagine it, seeing what I've seen about the stability of ASP/IIS/NT. I know of a company that just set up a *brand new* NT/SQL Server machine, which will act as a DB server to their NT/IIS server. You can already blue screen the thing, just by running packages in the Enterprise Manager. :-)
I suppose if you want to run a ring of web servers...but you're still going to run into weirdness, I'd bet. Man, that's like intentionally running your head full speed into a brick wall.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]
Where's the Source? (Score:2)
So... maybe. Or is this just another "call it open and sucker people into working on your project" scam?
Also, look at Enhydra ... (Score:1)
Re:E-barter (Score:1)
Think it'd be practical to start implementing transactions with N>2 participants? Set up circles, I do your docs, you do his debugging, he gives her the chip, she gives me the palm. (No pun, or illegal intent, intended
Re:E-barter (Score:1)
Um. I have to disagree on that point. Have you heard of eBay or any of the other auction sites? How do you think sellers on eBay ship their stuff? Transporters? Bottom line, bartering usually works out to the benefit of both parties. Think about it, if you are willing to trade the item that you obviously don't really care about (be it baseball cards or your time) for something that you want/need, then you've come out ahead. And lets face it, if you were even willing to trade (an item or your time/skills) then it's obviously something that you don't value that much.
Pete
I can see through time - Lisa Simpson
Re:Minivend (Score:1)
Re:Depends on your size (Score:1)
Re:E-barter (Score:2)
I'm guessing that most participants would have flexible wants or multiple needs, eg 'I need a nice PCI soundcard and some memory', or 'I need some docs and some VB code'. If this is true, the system becomes practical and efficient with a relitivly small user base.
I'm going to do a little bit of figurative guesstimation. Assume we are always trading hardware for services rendered. Further, assume that there are only twenty services and forty types of hardware. If each person wants two different bits of hardware and could potentially perform three different services, (or vice versa) the system hits a guaranteed 100% match rate with only 140 entries. At 2 and 2, 200 entries. 1 and 2 yields 400, while the most specific case garners 800. Eight hundred entries isn't that high a number, especially when every techie and his sibling wants a new toy, and unemployment is so terribly low that others pay through the nose for people they wouldn't consider hiring normally. (let alone competent people!)
I realize that there may be HUNDREDS of each, and that some swaps may be service/service hardware/hardware, but I was only interested in the effect of specificity on feasibility anyway, and I'm not even going to contemplate anything more complex before morning.
(Note to myself: Quit reading manuals and scientific papers. You are beginning to sound like one.)
Re: Where's the Source? (Score:1)
Re:E-barter is good, but don't forget Uncle Sam... (Score:1)
Re:E-barter (Score:1)
A barter system works great if you set up an alternate currency. The internet is the ideal medium for such a thing.
Re:This is great news!!! (Score:1)
Re:There's Yams too (Score:1)
Yes, we already trade time. (i.e., you give me some firewall, I give you some load balancing, boom bam we have a deal).
We need a way to trade time. What's the deal with all this sales of goods? This is a services economy. Some of us do seek to address this issue.
Re:Minivend is very complicated (Score:1)
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.
high availability and SSL certficates? (Score:1)
And another one... (Score:1)
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/ [st-and.ac.uk].
Enjoy!
phooey (Score:2)
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.]
Plug for Minivend (Score:1)
Re:but HOW to get it? (Score:1)
Not to be redundant, but there are a couple of solutions that are out now, and are working. YAMS [screamdesign.com] is currently available (under the GPL), is in use at the ScreamDesign store [screamstore.com], and is being actively developed. Minivend, opencart, MySQLShopper, Webshop and a grundle of others show up in a search of freshmeat [freshmeat.net].
When OpenSales becomes an opensource package, it will be interesting to see how much cross pollination occurs -- and which packages shake out at the top of the pile.
Re:This is great news!!! (Score:1)
It's a free clone of WebObjects
Re:sometimes open source just means unsellable (Score:1)
OpenSales license and product status (Score:1)
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.
Re:Minivend (Score:1)
ecTechWeb (Score:1)
Re:E-barter (Score:1)
I think you could also ease the complexity if you had the database make the matches. You sign up and list your available skills, and your desires (including, for people like me, an "everything" box
A lot of the architecture would be almost identical to job search sites that match your skills with employer needs.