Why isn Kartris open source?
There are 2 main reasons. Firstly, it costs money to produce good software and to support it. Whilst there are pure open source business models that some exploit successfully, these have worked best for products where the contributors are motivated by a sense of social activism. The nature of ecommerce is that the end users are businesses, selling their wares for profit, rather than social activists contributing hours of their time for free for a good cause. To this end, many free open source ecommerce products have floundered as the economics of producing software for free, to businesses that are going to use it to make profit eventually fail. Some vendors have gone down the route of a free open source base version with a paid-for enterprise one. However due to the fact that so few uses purchase the paid-for one, the costs of it become very high, which in turn restricts sales. Our aim is to have a free base product, and a reasonably priced enterprise one. The second issue is one of su
