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osCommerce is the most terrific example of crap code. Even for PHP standards, it's pretty abysimal. (Second only to the venerable phpNuke and phpBB maybe.)

If you're not looking for security or maintanance issues, but only want an excuse to hype the GNU GPL, it might be a great example however...

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This article begins misleadingly stating that "Long-time development team member Rhea Anthony apparently felt that investing further energy in the existing project was not going to work out, so she built her own team and forked osCommerce", as though a group of osCommerce Team developers have created this as a legitimate (legal) fork. Such is not the case at all. Not one of the members of this group has ever been on the osCommerce development team and not one has any legitimate right to the osCommerce name and copyright. Rhea Anthony was for a very short period a provisional team member and served as a forum moderator only, a position she resigned years ago. This group instead is comprised of a group of upstart, self promoting disgruntled osCommerce FORUM members who have decided to hijack the osCommerce name and copyright to their own ends on the basis of, to quote Rhea Anthony: "the brand awareness that osCommerce has".

As such, this group has no right whatsoever to use the osCommerce trademark name and copyright and their release files are clearly in breach of the GPL due to alterations they have made to the legitimate copyright notices of the true osCommerce. Such a breach of the license terms of the software negates their very right to use or distribute the software.

This group was strongly advised by both present and former Team Members of the true osCommerce project, and others, to legitimately fork the project under their own name, something which all other parties would be perfectly happy with, but to no avail.

So, rather than promoting legitimate use and forking of open source software, this article promotes software piracy, copyright and trademark infringement, setting a dangerous precedent that if widely followed would lead to the implosion of free software as a legitimate licensing model.

This is software piracy and not a true open source fork.

Matti Ressler
Suomedia

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