I could all out flame CRE Loaded and Salvatore Iozzia here today but what good would it do? I doubt very highly that it would make any real difference to the current CRE Loaded open source model. Fact is, I had plenty to say in the “Sal’s Message to the Community” thread at the CRE Loaded forums regarding past and current issues, and it seems Sal is oblivious to the opinion’s that were offered. He somehow managed to muster up enough backbone to to create the post, while flip flopping on the entire issue. The entire post looks like it was pulled out of a page from the past with many of the more well-known forum members taking a whack at Sal’s pride.

By know it is probably obvious that I am not new to CRE Loaded. I started using it back in 2003-2004 when it was still in [bug filled] version v6.15. I even did work for Sal [installations, contribution additions] while I was upstarting my hosting business. That was until he screwed me out of $500 for worked I performed and about the time that David Graham, of the osCommerce University, suggested that Sal start selling CRE Loaded. I remember having a chat conversation with David regarding sale of the open source application but was never aware that he suggested it [or I am getting too old to remember]. I gently poked David in the aforementioned thread by saying “If your suggesting that you persuaded Sal to sell CRE then, Shame on you! It was you sir who created the Ugly Monster!” His response clearly showed that he was as pissed as I… “Yeah, well, I never intended anyone to mislead the public about the GPL and its implications either. Which is why EOS itself is free and will remain so.” What? is it possible that Salvatore Iozzia could mislead the end user? Sure it is. I read posts by Sal, and his now world famous moderator Gerald, regarding the GPL license. It was clear to me that what they were trying to do was mislead the lesser informed end user that they really were not permitted to do anything with CRE… but pay for it.

Now this brings up a new question… what exactly was the end user paying for? That ultimately is a very good question. At this point, I have no idea. David Graham recently blogged about this in his post “CRE Launches New Open Source Model” and stated that “My original concept when proposing CRE Loaded commercialization was to charge a standard fee per copy distributed with a 30 to 90 day support window, following which support could be obtained on a contract basis.” Okay, so the end user was paying for support? Hmmm… having had conversations with owners of other companies that were using, or had clients using CRE Loaded, this was clearly not the case. Apparently, support was one thing that was missing from the $200 price tag for Pro and $300 price tag for B2B.

Okay, so what do I think about all of this? What was missing from the launch of the new model and CRE 6.2 was Value-Added Services. By definition, it would be the term for non-core services… services that add value to a standard service offering. This could be any number of things. Using CRE as an example, the value-added services could be Support, plugins, templates, etc. As an active supporter of Open Source applications since 2003, we offer web site hosting and hosting services for a variety of open source applications and provide value-added services such as free professional installation and free support for a variety of issues that a customer my experience while using the application. We also provide web site programming services for these applications at a nominal [and below industry standard] fee.

So my question is… why is it that Sal thought it a good idea to sell CRE when he could have offered additional value-added services at reasonable rates? These services could have been any or all of those mentioned above. Support/Maintenance contracts could have been offered to those who either do not have the experience necessary to modify code or just did not want to. Plugins, that could not be found for free at osCommerce.com, could have been developed in-house and sold in the CRE store. Same goes for custom templates. Any service or a combination of services could have been offered to the CRE end user, whom I might add would have been more than happy to pay for. However, the “Evil Greedy Overlord” could not help himself. He not only put unreasonable price tags on the open source application, he charged 2 arms and a leg for additional services that really should have been part of the “support” the end user was supposed to get.

So what have we learned from all this? Never, and I mean never pay for open source applications. The whole idea behind open source is that the source code should be free. This does not mean that everything should be free [contributions, support, templates, hosting, etc], but that the application itself should be free. Granted, the GPL license states that you can sell the code. That is correct, sir. Let’s use Linux as an example. Linus Torvalds wrote and released Linux as open source and it can be found everywhere for $0. Why is it that Red Hat is selling it then? Well, they are not selling the Linux source code. What they are selling is value-added services in the forum of features that can not be found in the original source, support and improved & robust versions.

Finally, we have also learned that you can’t trust anyone who calls themselves the “Evil Overlord.”