Hi Steve I agree with you in many areas. Well. well Open Source is now having lots of meanings today.Others like octopus MFI they say Octopus Community Version is open source in a sense that its free to use but not necessarily means that source codes are open too, and the funny thing is that the community version is trimmed of many important features .Very few communities today can give full working packages without intentional bugs and sorts.But their quite happy for your best contribution that will give edge. -Whatever way you choose PHP will tally highest...so many evangelists have criticized PHP with all their efforts and skills but they never succeed.But always you will never find many Wiki, CRMs,CMSs, free Accounting,financial ,system management apps in other language other than in PHP....Java lovers are mostly greedy people who like to hide codes on online.and nothing more.Java people will never give the world of open source anything that PHP has given. -Well back to "...Oracle have their own twisted way of managing open source...." this own way is what we have seen them in court with Google for Java, java would have turned useless if the court decided otherwise.Why do you think Java needed MySQL?Is it the same as RedHat with Fedora?These guys are crazy and evil..I just gave ana Example of M-Pesa with Kenya bright mind.Have propriety products with open by the side is like taping bests things for free from Open side and use them in propriety side. -- Regards, Nicholas Peter.* Kinpro Computers.* ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Steve Obbayi <steve@sobbayi.com> To: Skunkworks Mailing List <skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke> Cc: Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 10:06:11 +0300 (EAT) Subject: Re: [Skunkworks] POS solution Hi Mark, my company is working on a POS which is a drop in of a bigger application. You can deploy on premise or run in cloud. You can get the source if you want, but we offer an SLA to handle that, which is cheaper than you having a full-time dev screw up the code. So Mark, I will send you the details probably tomorrow and see if we can set you up with a demo. The basic version has all that you have asked for so far. Now Nicholas, I have to to jump in at this point and comment on some of your points 1. When you say PHP is easier than xxxx that's very subjective, that may be true for you and your peers. Maybe Mark has the resources who are experts in other languages. I certainly do have. Think about it. Besides, open source doesn't center around PHP. There's a lot I could argue on this, but not now. 2. Just so you know MariaDB was not started because of fear of Oracle killing MySQL it was started after Sun acquired MySQL. I personally got involved in MariaDB right from day one back in 2008 that is 6 years ago. Another thing, the latest MySQL 5.6 has the largest amount of feature additions and performance improvements of any previous MySQL version. I don't know if that constitutes killing it. The thing with Oracle is that they have their own twisted way of managing open source and that's what pisses off people. especially seeing the like of Oracel, Ms and Apple have historically not been know to be too keen on open source. 3. I agree with you on the source code. I have had a few customers ask for source code and not make much use of it. I think having source code just makes customers feel fuzzy and sleep better at night but when it comes down to it they always come back for new features from upstream. But all in all its always costly for customers to try to maintain source code themselves because they have to maintain full time devs, who have to be trained on the code. Then getting patches and bug fixes may break code that was added by the dev so they end up avoiding them. It just becomes a nightmare and this becomes part of the reason why today many companies are stuck on legacy systems/backward-compatibly issues.