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August 16, 1999
Web posted at: 11:00 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT)

by Niall McKay

(IDG) -- The electronic commerce market segment is the latest convert to the open source movement, and vendors at the LinuxWorld expo launched a bevy of products tailored to meet the needs of today's Internet economy.

At the show, Magic Software launched the Linux version of its eMerchant business-to-business electronic commerce solution; OpenSales previewed the beta version of its OpenMerchant software; and Red Hat showed its Apache-based E-Commerce Server (launched in July).

Meanwhile, companies such as IBM, Oracle, and BEA demonstrated their enterprise electronic-commerce-enabled application-server technology on the Linux platform, while Hewlett-Packard previewed the beta version of its new E-speak Internet services platform.

Indeed, with the electronic commerce market due to grow from $70 billion in the last five years to over $2.7 trillion in the next five years (according to a report by the International Data Group), the need for open source software products to run the electronic economy is sure to increase.

Furthermore, many Internet corporations such as HotMail and Yahoo do not charge users for their services, so there is great incentive to use low- or no-cost software solutions provided by the open source community. In addition, many such companies are attracted to open source solutions because access to the source code enables them to tweak the software to meet their specific needs.

"Cost is certainly one of the major attractions to using open source software for us," said Dan Cornell, vice president of engineering for Atension, an electronic commerce solutions provider in San Antonio, Texas. "The other attraction is that it's an open platform and that is very important if you are trying to build electronic commerce services for today's corporations."

While Apache is undoubtedly one of the most widely used Web servers (with 56 percent market share according to NetCraft Internet Surveys) many argue that it's not quite ready for the electronic commerce space because it lacks much of the transaction and enterprise-integration features needed to carry out industrial-strength commerce over the Web.

However, Cornell, who has designed e-commerce sites such as Ties.com and baseballexp.com, believes that this will soon change as companies such as IBM, BEA, and Oracle provide Linux solutions from the top down and the grassroots Linux developers work from the ground up.

"There is still some way to go to provide some of the industrial-strength application-server-like functionality that is needed to run a really busy site," said Cornell. "But it's getting there as more of the enterprise software vendors become Linux converts.

And such industrial-strength functionality is on the way as Sun Microsystems makes elements of its Java software available on the Linux platform. In fact, Sun has already committed to providing a reference implementation of the Java Servlet API and Java Server Pages on the Apache server. And IBM is running Enterprise Java Beans back-end software components on its Apache-based WebSphere product line.

In the meantime, Cornell is using WebSphere to carry out the Web functionality and using whichever back-end database Atension's customers are using to carry out the back-end transactions.

Meanwhile, electronic commerce vendor Magic Software announced Linux support for its eMerchant electronic commerce server, and OpenSales, an e-commerce startup, is providing the source code for its OpenMerchant server this week.

OpenMerchant, designed by the OpenSales CTO Rob Ferber (who built the eToys site), is written in Perl and is currently in beta. OpenSales is making the source code available free, according to OpenSales CEO Michelle Kraus. The product combines a Web publishing system with template-based merchant, order, and inventory-management tools.

"We decided to go the open source root not because the proprietary root is bad; it's just finished," said Kraus. "We realize that that there is a gold rush on the Internet right now and there are going to be people who succeed and people who fail, but they will all need tools to build their sites."

OpenSales hopes that by providing the base configuration free it will be able to make money on services, support, and customization.

Magic Software's eMerchant software is neither free nor open source. The product provides transaction processing as well as order-entry capabilities and is designed to be integrated with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications such as Baan and SAP, according to Rephael Inbar, CEO of Magic Software USA.

"eMerchant is a business-to-business e-commerce product which is best suited for applications that have a high degree of repeat business," said Inbar, "because it has the ability to store past customer orders and provide summarized versions of a customer's purchase folders.

For low-end electronic commerce sites there is Red Hat's just-launched E-Commerce Server, an open source solution that costs $149. The server software features Red Hat Linux 6.0, Apache, and an RSA 128-bit encryption engine, along with e-commerce software from Hewlett-Packard, Hell's Kitchen Systems, and MiniVend.

More open source e-commerce bundles are due to appear later in the year. For instance, OpenSales is currently in discussion with Caldera.

And since both Linux and e-commerce have become two of the computer industry's favorite posturing issues of the late '90s, no doubt many more combinations are sure to follow.

Niall McKay is a San Francisco-based columnist for the Irish Times. He also writes for Wired magazine.