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Who Opened Open Source'
In a general sense open source means something isfree to use by anyone regardless of whether it is
a physical product or something downloadable. As
a philosophy, “open source” is a set of
principles and practices that promote access to
the production and design process for various
goods or products.
The expression itself originated from the fact
that software is free and has an open source code.
This kind of software has become available to
the general public with relaxed or non-existent
intellectual property restrictions, which has
allowed the creation of user-generated software
content through incremental individual efforts.
In some ways the open source philosophy and
approach is similar to brainstorming, when the
best variation can be chosen from many. As a
source it is open to anyone. Anyone can modify it
over and over again and eventually the best
possibility is discovered, and then improved
again and again.
In our case the open source e-Commerce engines
were produced by a group of people who call
themselves “Chain Reaction E-commerce” and called
it CRE Loaded. (Of course there are many more
engines but this article is about only one of
them.) After letting the genie out of the bottle
CRE Loaded engines has been modified hundreds of
times by thousands of designers who have made
tens of thousands CRE Loaded templates out of a
single source.
Of course in some way this soft kind of an abuse
is not always good as the results are sometimes
unprofessional and may spoil the original
advantages. In this case it is reasonable to work
with the so-called “publically licensed”
companies that customize and modify the original
variant. This “public license” means that this
company’s products are well recognized by
audience, they have positive feedbacks at target
forums and resources and the company in general
is customer-oriented. Those things lead to
successful branding and successful branding
obliges businesses to have decent products.
The open source theoretically means several
development principles (according to the Bazaar
model):
• Users should be treated as co-developers (The
users are treated like co-developers and so they
should have access to the source code of the
software).
• Early Releases (The first version of the
software should be released as early as possible
so as to increase one's chances of finding co-
developers early).
• Frequent Integration (New code should be
integrated as often as possible so as to avoid
the overhead of fixing a large number of bugs at
the end of the project life cycle).
• Several Versions (There should be at least two
versions of the software. There should be a
buggier version with more features and a more
stable version with fewer features. The users can
then act as co-developers, reporting bugs and
providing bug fixes).
• High Modularization (The general structure of
the software should be modular allowing for
parallel development).
Of course not all of those patterns are used
while developing most of the software products
but while designing CRE Loaded shopping cart most
of those were enabled. Perhaps that is why
CRELoaded technology as a whole and CRELoaded
templates are so popular on the Internet today.