We are fortunate to have a unique relationship with our community that is based on trust. This was built on and earned naturally from the very beginning when we first announced ourselves to the world in March 2000. Our user base has grown from a few people to millions worldwide, attracted through curiosity and interest - not by hype or marketing campaigns.

Attracting such a large amount of interest was possible by releasing our products under the Open Source GNU General Public License and allowing people not only to work with the source code of our products, but to actively participate in discussions and development, and be involved in the direction we were taking.

We were first called “The Exchange Project” to reflect the relationship between sellers and buyers exchanging goods, and to also reflect people participating and exchanging ideas in our community. Our first slogan was “Community Made Shopping”.

We introduced a lot of our community members to PHP and Open Source. Store Owners that had enough of the limitations of point-and-click solutions now had the power to dive into the actual source code of our products and to perform the modifications they required. They shared the same beliefs in exchanging ideas and Open Source, and started to contribute additional features to share with the community.

There are now over 6,400 Add-Ons that have been contributed by our community members, available for free as Open Source for others to use, modify, and help improve on. That’s over 27,000 uploaded archives with over 48,000,000 lines of code!

Our Community Rocks!

Not only has Open Source helped us establish a thriving worldwide community of store owners, developers, and enthusiasts, it has also created opportunities outside our community by spawning many project forks, commercial solutions, and commercial services, and have also inspired and influenced many Open Source and commercial solutions available today.

The GNU General Public License has served us well for 11 years and with the launch of osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0, is now time to move on and target higher goals.

We want to take our success with Open Source even further and continue sharing it with you. We want to create even more business possibilities and opportunities for store owners, developers, and our community. We want to spawn even more project forks, commercial solutions, and commercial services that anyone and everyone can profit from.

We want to be at the core of e-commerce!

To make this possible, osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 will be released under the BSD license, completely. All source code including the core framework and modules will be published under the BSD license.

Sharing all of our hard work, for free, under the BSD license. We are giving you total freedom!

This will drive innovation and competition further in our eco-system. Community members now have the choice to release their Add-Ons under a BSD compatible license or to continue using the GNU General Public License. Commercial Add-Ons will be accepted later this year through an integrated market place providing the best user experience we can offer.

We are one of the first general solutions to move to PHP 5.3, and are now also one of the first general solutions to move completely to the BSD license and give you total freedom.

Open Source Rocks!

(Source: countdown.oscommerce.com)