And now you can sell things with open source, too. Introducing Magento
Jack Aboutboul at Red Hat clued me into an interesting open-source ecommerce platform today. Called Magento, it's built by Varien and is "a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution offering merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store."
Put in English, Magento is an open-source solution for setting up and managing an online store. The product appears to be pretty robust already, but the roadmap looks even better.
If you need to set up an online store, why pay the six- to seven-figures to do so when you can use Magento for free and then pay when you want support going into production?
Those open sourcerors. Why won't they stay in the limited boxes/categories where the 20th-century proprietary vendors want them to remain? Marketcetera, OpenAds, etc. Darned pesky open source kids!
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
These guys are really cool and growing quickly! 125,000 downloads already since September! Strength in numbers. Good luck to them, they have great stuff. Good code by good folks who believe in the power of open source...
It has been possible to "sell things with open source" using open source e-commerce software for years. A Google search for "open source ecommerce" turns up almost two million results. Glancing at those results, I see Zen Cart, FishCart, Ubercart, Agoracart, Digistore, Anigra, OpenSales, osCMax, and phpShop. The list goes on and on.
This post looks like a rather misleading press release for Magento.
Magento is a far superior Open Source e-commerce package when compared to what already exists, not to mention it is still in beta.
For instance, check out their Endeca like guided navigation.
Roy is creating a masterpiece.
In addition, Matt is truly the leading authority on Open Source. I trust his opinion on Open Source matters.
@pkiula - Magento is an extensive application that includes many features that online businesses expect (and more to come). Thanks for checking us out!
Just wanted to say that I think you guys are onto a real winner here. Cosmetically you are certainly leading the way. I have used many OpenSource eCarts so my camparisons re: cosmetics are accurate.
Can I throw in my 20c worth regarding Matt's quote:
"Why pay the the six- to seven-figures to do so when you can use Magento for free"
Matt there is still a large market for developers / designers to customize and re-code the interface according to client specs.
There will be many clients wanting a "unique interface" which in many instances can cost in the thousands to complete. The average punter will A: Not have the time to do this and will therefore require an expert to rake over and B: Not have either the design or development skill to make it work according to the clients vision.
I hear what your saying and I do believe that 7 figures is far too pricy however it is important that the average punter understands that customizing Magneto to work according to there vision will cost money. My main concern with your comment is that it will mislead the average Jo Blogs into thinking that the amount they paid to have there Open Source eCart fully customized /designed "$3k" was a rip as they could have got it "free" "Why pay the the six- to seven-figures to do so when you can use Magento for free"...
Yes... I custom re-design and develop eCarts at a price, and yes...I am trying to protect the integrity of my work, and prices and the many others out there who are making a humble living from Open Source.
That's my 20c.
But one is very important to know. Magento need a lot of hardware! Shared-Hosting? No way!
- by templatesmaster October 30, 2008 2:32 AM PDT
- Magento is really powerful and have hundreds of features. Many other commercial shopping carts sell all this modules for additional price. We estimate that many paid ecommerce solution will disappear and Magento will become standart for php / mysql ecommerce platforms. This will make life for ecommerce developers much easier. As it was written above shared hosting packages is bad idea for Magento stores. We were also glad to see really flexible template system for Magento.
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