“We recognised that the commercial Open Source model increasingly offers the best way produce and sell business software. We also felt that the existing Open Source eShop solutions did not offer proven quality of Oxid; with thousands of existing international customers and a solid partner network. We saw this as an unmissable opportunity to lead the new rising market,” comments Oxid CEO Roland Fesenmayr, explaining the company’s decision. “We have had to restructure the company to take full advantage of the benefits of Open Source development and distribution, as well as to guard against some of risks we are laying ourselves open to. But overall we are convinced this is the most effective way to expand our presence in the global market.”
The company has streamlined its own internal development process to take full advantage of the rapid pace of innovation and faster product cycles it expects as an Open Source solution. Adopting a similar model to some of the most successful corporate-backed Open Source projects, Oxid will continue to offer its software under proprietary license for customers and partners who prefer this option, and will offer a supplemented enterprise edition, OXID eShop EE, with enhanced scalability, robustness, rights and role management, multi-site functionality, and enterprise-grade support options.
Already based on the LAMP stack of popular Open Source technologies (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), Oxid has a clean, clear, modular architecture that is well suited to the Open Source development model. Changes to the core software kernel will remain under the control of Oxid, with the company moderating suggestions from its community for improvements and bug-fixes.
Partner companies using Oxid can develop modules to extend the product and develop new add-on functionality, with the option to have these quality checked and certified by Oxid. Under the dual license model, partners will be able to sell these modules as proprietary add-ons to the OXID eShop PE edition or distribute them under the GPL as add-ons for the OXID eShop CE Open Source version.
Oxid has invested heavily in a new community platform (http://www.oxid-
“At this stage we simply want people to download the software, try it, use it, be successful and hopefully join Oxid’s Open Source community,” comments Roland Fesenmayr outlining the company’s initial intentions. “Moving forward, we have big plans for the new company and the new community, but we appreciate the scale of the changes we are making and we want to take things one step at a time.”
OXID eShop CE is available for download at:
http://www.oxid-
