Magento

When you’ve got people that will gladly pay for a free product, that’s when you know you’ve got something great!

Of course, they can always buy Magento schwag to support the project, when the Magento store is open…

Hello,

Everything sounds great, but I have only one question: I see that “Developers can modify and customize the software and distribute their own derivative works under the OSL 3.0 license.”.
How about this scenario:

A developer builds a custom solution for a certain customer, based on Magento; the final work would have to released under under the OSL 3.0 license? The reason I’m asking is that some customers would like to obtain copyright on that work.
I guess a BSD License would be more appropriate for this scenario, but it’s not the case here.

Thanks, Joe.

I had a quick read through the FAQ’s so sorry if this was mentioned, but will your solution have a ‘powered by Magento’ text at the bottom, or will you allow this to be switched off etc etc

Hello Ian,

From what I saw, it’s not required to display such text, but if you do, there are some guidelines on how you can and cannot do it.

Thanks, Joe.

Your trademark policy will slow down the marketing of magento as well as produce alot of trouble with international trademark policies and laws. Using this policy you declare that Varien is the only company who can (successful) make commercial projects using Magento.

Why Varien can let as make ours own community like oscommerce.com/.de/.pl?

IMHO it would be better solution.

Can’t wait to see this product released. Do we have a set date in mind during August?

Also nice to see Varien commiting themselves to the OSC.

Looking forward to test-driving this product.

Mark

Hey guys, what’s up with you??? From what I’ve read ‘til now Varien is doing a GREAT job. They are developing a cute product - and it seems they have the skills to do it in the right manner. And: they are giving it away for free!

Scandic: It’s their good right to apply such restrictions. If they allow everyone and his mom to sell Magento-jam they would for sure going to destroy a well introduced trademark.

Sebastian: I’m pretty sure that you could do it better. So feel free to go wherever you want and found your Community (respecting Varien’s trademark)!

Cheers,
Thomas

NB: Please don’t get me wrong - I don’t want to attack you personally!

@Scandic i fully agree with you. I hope that Varien will provide solution for that.

Ok, let’s say I want to create and market some ready made themes for Magento. Can I refer to them as “Magento themes” or “themes for Magento”? I’m not 100% sure after reading the trademark FAQ.

John,

I’d recommend you have a chat with Varien regards to using trademarks. I have similar plans to introduce customisation and theme services once Magento goes live. In addition a UK based portal to promote the product and its features.

Cheers,

Mark

@ Mark Hedley , If you need any help in promoting Magento in the UK im willing too help as im from there.

Cheers

I would also love to see some front-end images , cant wait till the beta release

Joe - Unfortunately, copyright belongs to the copyright owners. In fact, we do not even own all of the copyrights for Magento (we are using javascript libraries, etc.).
Ian - There are no attribution requirements with the license.
Scandic - We strongly disagree. In fact, we expect significant commercial opportunities for many companies with Magento (more on that in the weeks ahead).
John - ‘Themes for Magento’ should be fine

Hello,

That would be fine. It was a question I felt I need to ask to have everything clear.

Thanks, Joe.

@ Daryl,

Give me a shout on msn:

Cheers,

Mark

Roy,

how about allowing the community to have a UK based support forum, themes section and also links to magento’s main portal?

I think having country specific information on the opensource product would be beneficial and I believe others would agree too.

Cheers,

Mark

Hello Roy,
I’m a freelance webdesigner and if Magento is out I’d like to offer customized themes and designs for my clients. Am I allowed to display a Magento Logo at my “services"-page to show that I offer such a service? Of course I would also display a note that I’m not the owner of the trademark.

If not, how can I inform my clients about the service without getting into any trademark trouble?

Thanks in advance and keep up the good work! Magento looks great!
Toto

Toto - Unfortunately, you can not display the Magento logo on your site at this time. You can certainly inform your clients of your services without using the logo (as Varien did with osCommerce).
In the future, we will have a partner network that will allow usage of our trademarks.

Mark - we certainly don’t have a problem with localized support sites, as long as they follow the license and trademark guidelines. In fact, we fully support it and will help as much as we can.

Roy,

could we discuss some options for the UK market in a private discussion?

I’d be keen to advocate a partner web site in the UK for this product.

Regards,

Mark

First of all I just found out about this ecommerce solution and I am about to wet my pants in excitement.

Thanks for making it open source with such a great product! I would certainly pay for it.

Just a question about the license. I understand you want to protect your trademark.

Is it allowed to offer ecommerce solutions based on Magento without using the Magento name as our own service or product? Like a hosted solution for example.

Also, do you have full support for the european VAT system by default? It’s quite a mess.

Thank you.

John - Thanks for the kind words! In regards to your question about the hosted solution, please refer to the ‘External Deployment section of the license.

Support for European VAT will be included in future versions.

Roy,

did my email find it’s way to you?

Cheers,

Mark

Roy: The european tax laws are pretty complicated and needs special additions to comply. By future versions I hope you mean at least beta 2

I am really eager to use this cart!

Also it would be cool if you support payment methods based on destination. Not sure if this is implemented yet. Since some of our clients ship to different countries, not all payment methods work for everyone. Consider adding support for payment surcharges for shipping methods / payment methods, where admins can specify custom surcharge names and fees.

And about multiple website support. Will it be possible to share the checkout and using one SSL certificate not having to purchase multiple ones? A bit like how shopify works.

Thank you.

Mark - I received your email. I’ll try to respond shortly (I am way behind on emails since getting back to LA).

John - I’ll pass along your comments about payments. In regards to multiple website support, Magento will have the option to specify secure and unsecure URL’s per store - I am not sure however that you can checkout from a single URL for all stores.

Do you have the date for the launch? i am overly highly excited about its launch… cannot stand wait already

Thomas - late August most likely. Once we have a firm date, we’ll post it.

If SSL is an issue Thawte do a wildcard cert which allows you do use *.domain.name

so you could have: uksecure.domain, frsecure.domain etc.

Failing that I’m sure it would be possible to point all sites at a common SSL url.

Cheers,

Mark

@ John,

Sent you a reply email looking forward to hearing back from you.

If there is anyone else in the UK reading this site I’d also be keen to speak to you about potential marketing opportunities for Magento in the UK.

Cheers,

Mark

This is not opensource, but free to use and also includes free hosting

http://www.wosbee.com

Aussie Interconnect have similar plans to Mark in the UK ie - introduce customisation and mod services once Magento goes live. An Aussie based portal to promote the product etc would get us in the right direction.
Any other Aussies out there can contact me and we can look forward re Magento and possibilities.
We have just shelved our current project to “Aussieise” CRE and feel Magento will be a much better fit to our company.
Mark - You any further in your enquiries etc. We don’t mind, in fact we would encourage any interactions we could both utilise.

To Scandic:

Even if Varien has the trademark of Magento itself how does it keep you from selling a service of installing, maintaining, updating, developing new parts to it etc. it. As I understand as long as the core of Magento is unchanged (I would imagine except design) and you clearly state that the software solution is free, but installations made by you etc. cost, you steer clear. I see those as commercial projects also. Even though virtual in the matter of not being anything you can lay your hands on.

I understand wanting to trademark this kind of name so it could not be associated with parties that might give the solution itself a negative pr. People just are such, that of a good service/solution they tell to 1 friend. Of a bad service/solution they tell to 14. One bad apple could spoil the whole thing.

I think it’s good to have some skillful commercial organization having some of threads in their hands so it doesn’t blow up in user communities face at some point (as have happened in some cases). It’s a huge project, lot’s and lot’s of workhours spent and still users get it free. Good promotion for makers and free for users, everyone wins.

Have you read this?

http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html

Seems like OSL may become a huge problem not being GPL compatible for one…

John - I have seen this before. Our attorney (who is one of the leading experts in the field), has advised us otherwise. In any case, we feel the OSL is a stronger license and addresses some issues that GPL does not.

@Roy
Could you elaborate on the issues that OSL addresses?

This what gnu.org have to say about the OSL license:

Open Software License, version 1.0

The Open Software License, version 1.0, is a free software license. Its authors say it is intended to be copyleft, but we are having trouble determining whether the copyleft provisions really work. It is incompatible with the GNU GPL in several ways.

All versions of the Open Software License have a term which requires distributors to try to obtain explicit assent to the license. This means that distributing OSL software on ordinary FTP sites, sending patches to ordinary mailing lists, or storing the software in an ordinary version control system, is arguably a violation of the license and would subject you to possible termination of the license. Thus, the Open Software License makes it very difficult to develop software using the ordinary tools of free software development. For this reason, and because it is incompatible with the GPL, we recommend that no version of the OSL be used for any software.

We urge you not to use the Open Software License for software you write. However, there is no reason to avoid running programs that have been released under this license.

From: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html

Will you be featuring a one page checkout?  I love the product pages from what I’ve seen and they look like they are absolutely primed for high conversions - but what about the checkout process?

Mike - A one page checkout is part of the Beta1 (preview) release, along with a multi-page, ship to multiple addresses checkout functionality.

Anyone interested in Magento freelance work can register now at http://www.maglance.com

I have a few projects lined up already that I will need help with…

Sorry for the no doubt stupid question, but with all the trademark stuff I just want to check. If I make changes to the code of magento, do I need to remove all the magento trademarks from the systems back end to be able to sell it with out infringing the trademarks? Is it just safest to remove all magento trademarks from my back end system?

Cheers

@sneddo - According to the license you will need to keep the copyrights as-is within the files. You can, however, remove all the trademarks from the footer and admin (whatever is displayed to the user). Keep in mind that if you make any code changes and distribute Magento (ie. selling), you will need to make it freely available as well under OSL3.0 as the license states.

You should really think about change next release to GPL v3 license.

@Tassoman - We are very comfortable with our decision to use OSL. Thanks for the input.