On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Mary Jo Sminkey <mary...@cfwebstore.com> wrote: > There's a lot of pitfalls to using open source software for ecommerce (and > yes, I may be biased, but I also speak from lots of experience in this > field). Anyone that has spent anytime with OSCommerce knows how convoluted > the code has become from years of many people messing with it.
That's not an inherent problem with OSS, more a problem with the quality of the coders who've been working on it (and that can be a general problem in the CF community and why so many complaints are cropping up in this thread about how hard the various e-commerce packages are to work with - and you hear it of many OSS CF projects). > Most of my customers will agree...they are paying just as much for the > support they get as for the code itself. Knowing that if something goes wrong > or stops working, they have someone to go to that will get it working for > them again. With something as mission critical as most ecommerce sites are, > that's usually worth a few bucks to get, versus saving some up-front with OSS > and then being on your own should any problems arise. Absolutely and that's what the POSS - Professional Open Source Software - model is all about: free software, paid support (like MySQL, JBoss, Red Hat - even Transfer ORM and ColdBox in the CF community). I'm finding this thread very interesting because I've reviewed a free e-commerce packages (some out of curiosity, some I've been paid to review) and whilst the code is almost always procedural, some are definitely more maintainable than others (so I suspect some of the difficulty expressed in this thread also comes from an inability to understand halfway complex code). As Mary Jo says, procedural != bad by definition but shopping carts tend to be fairly complex due to the various demands placed on them and they may well be the most complex part of a site, which may mean they're the most complex code a given developer has ever encountered. It's the same reason that many people find application frameworks extremely complex and hard to understand. Perfectly understandable and not actually a criticism of the framework code itself. I do find it a little ironic that there's an objection to paying even a few hundred dollars for something of value - and that folks keep asking for OSS (when they really mean free), yet OSS struggles in the CF community because developers won't donate their time for free - they want to be paid. So, hey, you want to be paid but you're not willing to pay for other developers' work? When you compare CF offerings to PHP offerings, remember that you're comparing against a culture of FOSS: LAMP is all free and open source and its developers tend to be much more amenable to giving work back to the community for free and contributing to other people's projects. Things are definitely improving in the CF world but we've got a long way to go before our collective mindset will lend itself to the rich eco-system of FOSS we envy in other communities... -- Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://getrailo.com/ An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ "If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology-Michael-Dinowitz/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:334876 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
