eCommerce News & Resources by oscommerceuniversity.com

Recently, Rhea Anthony, widely known to long time osCommerce users as Vger and a former member of Harald Ponce de Leon's osCommerce development team launched a bid to assume control of the osCommerce code base and community.  She and a number of other major contributors to osCommerce have relocated their oscanswers.com forum to a new domain - http://www.oscommerceproject.org , and releasing a distribution based on the most recent osCommerce release 2.2 RC2B which they are calling osCommerce 2.0 Final.

That community members involved as long as this team can't recall that the current osCommerce 2.2 development work was preceded by an osCommerce 2.1 release is a clear indicator of the necessity of this action if osCommerce is to survive as a project at all.  8+ years between releases is entirely too long.

In her first blog post as osCommerce Project leader,  Rhea tells a bit about herself and comments on the reasons for this drastic action.  If you have any interest in osCommerce at all, I strongly encourage you to read this post.  It is an interesting description of one view of the osCommerce community from a member who has been persistent and energetic in contributing to others.  But, it is one view.

The term "believer" has been a very powerful term in the osCommerce world in both positive and negative ways.  I can easily sympathize with Rhea's obvious disappointment at the disdain directed towards community members who claimed to be or were described as believers.  Having been among those who were disparaged by groups of "osCommerce beleivers"  because my own beliefs differed from their own, I also understand the disparagement.  We all beleive in something.  But some community members have and do beleive that the rest of us should beleive what they do and nothing more.

This lack of tolerance from and courtesy towards others is a deadly poison for any community.  The cure begins with leadership.  So, it is an encouraging step that Rhea has made the effort to establish regular communications via her blog early in the process of transforming the oscanswers forum into the oscommerce project site.  Keep it up, Rhea.  I can't say I'm a great blogger either.  But I can say it does get easier with time.  Along the way, I hope to see  you create a more open and accepting osCommerce community.  Towards that end, here are a few suggestions:

1. Don't settle for a development team.  Build a development community whose activities are open to all.  When viewpoints differ, establish working groups to represent those viewpoints with code that can prove or disprove their theories.  This is the one of the most powerful uses of branches.  They feed the tree, they don't starve it.
2. Build a documentation group.  Insist on performance from them, and cooperation with them so that technical documentation is available to all.  You can't build consensus without it.
3. Open the community to discussion of related projects in some way.  No project can benefit from code comparison and evaluation when the discussions are splintered across dozens of forums.  At the very least, branches should be able to post links and route discussion accordingly.
4. While disparagement and exclusion of community members should be avoided like the plague, the same can not be said of code contributions.  Once API documentation is published, contributions which fail to comply with coding standards should be ruthlessly separated from the rest or even deleted.  Establishing separate management of experimental API code is essential.
5. Open development discussions.  Smoke filled rooms are great for monopolists.  They have no place in Open Source.  So what if crackers can see your plans.  It is not like they can't read your code.  Keep your code discussion lively and take some time to explain things.   Knowledge is power, but its like manure - its got to be spread to be effective.

At this early stage, it is hard to see much difference between this new osCommerce Project and the old one. Time will tell, and I'm sure the differences Rhea mentioned will become apparent soon.  The sooner, the better.

It is good to see new osCommerce releases, and active development.  As one old Democrat to another, I'm happy to bid the new osCommerce Project welcome to the open source ecommerce community.

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Open Source eCommerce platforms and bootstapping go together like salt and pepper, ham and eggs or turkey and dressing. That's a fact.

Even when the software is commercialized, it offers significant advantages to the bootstrapping firm in the form of the implicit opportunity to craft new capabilities over time as funding allows.  Which is why I take this opportunity to reply to Javier Rojas description of bootstrapping, a  process in which founders self finance their way to profitability in his article "The Art of the Bootstrap" at venturebeat.com.

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In an unpublished article I started on October 15, I stated "Kerry Watson's new article was posted today on ecommerceguide.com. You can find it at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3777841 . It is entitled, "Can Iozzia Get the CRE Loaded Love Back?". The short answer is no."

While I still think I blew off a bit more steam than I want to publicize so quickly after Chain Reaction's devastating implosion (or indeed - at all), events since then have made me reconsider addressing the issue in this venue though not the conclusion of my initial paragraph.  First off was the management of the all too expected eruption of steam following Sal's "grand return" and the unbanning of a number of long time community members who were neither happy at being banned, or impressed with claims of change.  One of the most vociferous was Michael DesMarais of Supreme Center Hosting .

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I was reading an article entitled, "The Cutting Edge of Trade Secrets--How Far Should the Law Go To Prevent Misappropriation by Memory and Inevitable Disclosure" and what I found relevant to most small business computer networks are that employees often can setup email accounts and store emails on their personal home computer should the telecommuter - work at home.

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But is it? There seems plenty of reason to doubt whether the approach is either new or open source. My original concept when proposing CRE Loaded commercialization was to charge a standard fee per copy distributed with a 30 to 90 day support window, following which support could be obtained on a contract basis. Revenues would be further augmented by internally developed documentation and education offerings made available both directly to the public on Chain Reaction's own site, and via a distribution network of existing community vendors. The value of the software would be increased by ongoing addition of new features designed and built in house, and refactoring of the core code to bring it into alignment with the current PHP and MySQL feature sets and changes in the security environment.

What has emerged appears to be little more than SaaS without the second S. Here is why.

The "manual" posted on the latest incarnation of their website is a thinly disguised knock off of Kerry Watson's 6.2 Users Manual. They may argue that there are few other ways to state the programs use, and that just may be. But why can't the 'designers' of the software do any better? They should for example, have access to and include information on input formats and boundaries, and systemic capabilities and limitations which are not readily available to the non-programmer. Such information is not, as of the date of this writing, available in their "users guide". Their "educational program" consists of a page buried 3-5 levels deep in their site which asks the users to inform Chain Reaction of their educational needs so that content can be developed. So much for educational and documentation support.

Their new releases are "subscription" based. But there is some room for question as to just what users would be subscribing. What does Chain Reaction deliver in return for its charges?

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Thanks to a recent post by Rhea Anthony on the osCommerce forums, I recently discovered a post by  Amy Hoy regarding folks who spend their time hitting forums for help, but not returning any.  In her post at http://www.slash7.com/articles/2006/03/22/s-o-s-save-our-sanity she coins the term Help Vampires. Amy observes that Help Vampires can be the death of a community - and I think she is right.  Her response? Quote: "They're not evil creatures, Help Vampires. They act only on their blind instinct to feed, driven by base urges like most living things. Often even they themselves are not aware of their Help Vampire status, so leave your stakes at home. In light of these facts, I will provide information on reforming / re-education Help Vampires in addition to outfitting you with information on identifying and tracking them. If in the course of events you discover that you yourself are a Help Vampire, you will learn how to control your vampiric ways." Well said!  She goes on to give quite a nice plan for dealing with the critters which involves a three prong approach to reforming the Help Vampire:

1. Create resources for Help Vampires (and regular folks) to help themselves.
2. Cease all behavior which enables Help Vampires' vampy behavior.
3. Meet Help Vampires head-on.

I would add to this one a fourth - make sure that Help Vampires know how they can help you! Here are a few things Help Vampire could possibly bring to the table if they just thought to do so:

1. domain expertise - as in business practice expertise.  Many developers lack this, and would welcome input.
2. positive feedback - telling a developer what they have done right helps them focus attention on matters that DO need improvement.
3. send cash - many Open Source projects are done in spare time, and carry no direct monetary return to developers.

The most helpful thing a Help Vampire can do is learn and use better problem resolution skills, so here are a few links to other pages likely to be helpful in that regard.. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html  is Eric Raymond (ESR) 's guide to how to ask questions most productively.  Widely linked to, this is an Internet classic and must read.  Having once been taken to task for some slightly adult language in this page, I warn the sensitive reader to stay away from this link, and to avoid asking hackers for help.... http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html  is Simon Tatham's discourse on how to right a useful bug reports.  Having seen a few of those from the receiving end, I assure you that no matter how many bugs your software has, the reports you receive will have more.  If you are going to use Open Source software, READ THIS and limit the blood loss! No Comments