osCommerce is Dead: Long Live the NEW osCommerce Project

This is one in a series of columns on the open-source commerce (OSC) industry.

Fed up with waiting for eight long years with no final product in sight and no visible development activity, a splinter group of osCommerce programmers has left the dormant project and officially formed a new osCommerce project.

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Only two weeks since registering their domain www.oscommerceproject.org, the new group, headed by former team member Rhea Anthony, has already released a demo version of osCommerce 2.0 (Final) with a W3C HTML 4.1 compliant shop front based on the last released version of osCommerce, MS2.2 RC2b, which will complete the MS2 legacy. The group is also already working on completing osCommerce MS3 Alpha 4 to bring it to a final v3.0 release very soon.

Good-bye to the Old King: osCommerce

For the eighth year in a row, the grand-daddy of all open source ecommerce programs osCommerce did not release a full version of their program, and officially their program remains in beta status despite its widespread use in nearly 200,000 online stores.

Last January the group did release a bugfix release version 2.2 Release Candidate 2a, but this was the only official development of the year. The rest of the year the group remained silent. Leadership was absent even on the osCommerce forums which in previous years had been run with an iron fist.

Discussion of other open source programs was permitted and the posts remained, leading to speculation that the development team has simply abandoned ship. The once-prolific forum moderator and poster Ponce de Leon, who once posted to his forum daily, failed to even log onto his own forum for five months until he returned briefly earlier this month.

Eight years may be a world record for a program under development to not be released. Because the group took so long to develop their software, the operating systems and programs with which they write their software changed time and again, forcing them to do extensive re-writes of the osCommerce code each time.

Over the years, the unyielding management of the founder, Harald Ponce de Leon, forced team after team of developers to resign. A team of only two or three developers including Ponce de Leon have been ostensibly been working on the project for the past year, and one of them, Wendy James, was not active. Two weeks ago the only active member of the team Frank Heinen, resigned and Ponce de Leon fired the other, leaving founder Ponce de Leon as the sole remaining developer.

Hail the New King: the osCommerce Project

The New “osCommerce Project” domain name was registered on November 1, and the project was registered a few days later with SourceForge, the official repository for all open source development projects. The official description of "The osCommerce Project" on Sourceforge.net is "a new project dedicated to providing an alternative and active development stream to the old osCommerce project. Active members of the new project contain ex-Team Members of the old project as well as new active core members."

Long-time team member and prolific forum poster and moderator Rhea Anthony, also known as Vger in the old and new forums, heads the team comprised of Bobby Easland (Chemo) — the best coder NEVER to have been made a Team Member of the old project, who will be a development team member and moderator; Rob Fisher of FWR Media, contributor and moderator; Edith Karnitsch (Terra) contributor and moderator; and Monika Mathis (Monika in Germany), author of "Deep Inside osCommerce: The Cookbook," as moderator and Thomas Hodges-Hoyland (Tomh)as an administrator and Development Team member.

According to Anthony, until a few weeks ago founder Ponce de Leon had been absent from his own forums for over five months (not weeks but months). He only has one active English language Team Member, Jan Zongee who was moderating the forums.

Zongee reportedly gave up moderating the criticism or posts about other carts because he had his hands full with deleting porn spam. When the forums became nothing more than porn spam forums, Anthony decided that something had to be done. She already had a team in place at her website osC Answers using the same board software and format as the official osCommerce Forums, so that was her starting point.

(Continue to Page 2 for more details, including a 15-point checklist of features)