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osCommerce

The e-commerce.

Possible license violation


w3bd3v

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At my new job I have found that the current site we use is an OSCommerce site being licensed to us by an agency, which allows us to log in but not access any code through ftp or otherwise. The only way I was able to find that it was OSCommerce was looking into the source and finding that the OSCommerce notice was commented out in the admin panel. Through searching the forums I've read that this is a violation of the agreement.

 

Is this true, and if so is there some recourse available that would force them to render the site's files to us so that we could retain the site as it stands currently? 

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It may violate the license, and the spirit of Open Source, but if it's not a clear copyright or trademark infringement, osC may not have much leverage in getting it resolved. osC would even have to be careful about appearing to be libelous in bad-mouthing this agency (they can probably afford to hire better lawyers).

 

Is your data also held captive? osC itself is free, so you can always walk away from this scumbag and set up your own shop. It would take some work, but I suppose it's possible to scrape all your data one way or the other, to put in your own shop. Do they hold your domain name too? If your brand name (domain) is a large part of your site's value and you can't take it with you, you may have to continue to be enslaved. Otherwise, chalk it up to bad choices made earlier and move on.

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This is true, although they are a very small time agency that has had financial troubles in the past. I figured there wouldn't be much to do about it, but it was worth asking. 

 

I can get exports of the product DB I believe, but I'm not sure about the content. The HTML and CSS could be gotten manually. I believe whatever modifications they have made to osC are minimal, and may be able to be recreated, but I'm a frontender and have little experience with that sort of thing. Domain is ours thankfully. 

 

In the end I believe I'll just end up remaking the site completely. They are offering a paid upgrade to "their new version of their platform" which I have reason to believe is osC 2, which may have been great if they would actually let me at the code, but since they refuse I doubt we will be going this route.

 

Thanks for the reply and sound advice.  :thumbsup:

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If they own the server and you have no access, I'd say (bear in mind I Am Not A Lawyer) that they have not distributed the code ... therefore they don't have to give you that code even if you request it.

 

If you can get a DB dump, it is a days work to plug that into the latest osCommerce, as well as give it a theme, as well as recreate any "info" pages you might have (shipping.php and so on).

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There would not have anything of interest in the HTML... you would want their PHP code, which generates HTML during operation, and to which you're not going to have any access anyway.

 

There's no telling what modifications they've made, unless you want to figure out what osC version they seem to have, and compare it to an unmodified (vanilla) version you can obtain from this site (or GitHub, for the latest) and install. It's not clear what they have, if they're calling it "version 2". osC version 2 has been out for over 10 years. Version 2.3.4BS (responsive) is the current latest and greatest.

 

Regarding the database content they offer, about the best you can do is get it (as an .sql file) and compare it to the sample store (oscommerce.sql file) and see what seems to be there and what is missing. It's quite possible that they will not give you everything, preventing you from directly migrating your store's data to your own installation of osC. Unless you have a huge amount of data, it may well turn out easier to re-enter everything from scratch (or at least, copy and paste from their admin to yours).

 

If this agency is so secretive about their platform, and is small and financially unstable, it might well be best for you to move to a commercial server (host) and install your own site software (the store). That way, you'll have complete control over it. Of course, this does require some technical skills to install and maintain software, beyond your skills at simply using the store's software to operate it. Most hosts either don't want anything to do with customers' installed software, or will charge you a hefty fee to maintain it for you. If you're not comfortable with that notion, you might want to stay with someone who takes care of all of that for you, provided you can be confident that they'll continue to be around!

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So they've locked down the DB export function. It makes backups but I'm not able to download them, though I am able to see the path to it and it is 403'd. 

 

And yeah, php would be what I want best case scenario. The amount of products/variations are well in the 10's of thousands. Looks like I'm buggered any way you look at it. Time to just start from scratch.

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This agency sounds like a nasty bunch, if they don't give you access to your own data. Maybe you can look around from some "site scraping" tools that would methodically go through all your products and customer data (probably only on the admin side), and dump them to a file. Then you would massage the file(s) into SQL to populate your database. You need to be knowledgeable in osC and SQL (and data-munging tools such as Perl scripting) to make this happen. You would want to install 2.3.4BS (the latest) first, and try some products on it to see if you're missing any major function found on your current system. With luck, there are add-ons or simple CSS changes that can restore this functionality. If it appears that you can duplicate the function you need, you can think about the task of grabbing and migrating all your data over.

 

I assume that you've politely asked your agency to provide you with all your data, and they've refused.

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