The new osCommerce Project debunked - securing the future of osCommerce
osCommerce Online Merchant is an Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. osCommerce began life as "The Exchange Project" in March 2000 and quickly established itself as the shopping cart of choice for many developers and online shop owners. On 12th December 2001, in a move made to show its maturity, to strengthen its presence in the open source community and to show that the development team means business, adoption of the name "osCommerce" for the project was announced.
Since it's inception osCommerce has continued development with its latest osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 released on March 15 2009 as a stable, production ready solution. It has a growing online community now numbering over 200,000 members and is available as a standard feature on most webhosts through applications such as CPanel.
On Oct 24 2008 Rhea Anthony (Vger) of TerraNetwork announced "The New osCommerce Project" as an attempt to usurp the established osCommerce development team and community. This move was met with vocal opposition from osCommerce Team members, osCommerce users and the greater open source community, an opposition that continues to this day. It has been reasonably and soundly argued that Rhea Anthony and her team should "fork" the osCommerce project under a new and distinctive name as the GPL license allows rather than breach the trademark name and copyrights of osCommerce. Instead, Rhea Anthony and her team have arrogantly continued on their path and now have a policy of immediately banning any users on their online forums who dare to voice concerns over trademark and copyright violations and breaches of the GPL license. Coupled with this, they engage in misleading the public with claims that osCommerce is "Public Domain" or that trademarks are only valid if a mark is used in commercial transactions. Such claims are false.
This "new osCommerce Project - debunked" website exists to publicly expose "The New osCommerce Project" for what it really is and to guide members of the public to the true osCommerce website and community. More information and discussion on the issues may be found on our public forums.
