Open blittable opened 4 years ago
Comments on the above:
1) There are many different models in open-source. I've had that conversation here with people - why open-source? My thought on open-source is that if it is open-source it is easy to find (it's a marketing approach). There are other ways. Odoo https://www.odoo.com/ is the biggest, best open-source business suite that I can find. It's a huge download (most give-up) and has many important features disabled (unless you 'upgrade'). But, they get many commits from people who need something very specific for their business (tax calculation in Brazil). I discussed with K. and people like him would download and assess, but someone opening a restaurant is normally not on github. So, I'm not exactly sure on this. One point is that it can always go open-source later - but sounds like withholding some of the features might be the best approach now.
2) We can't avoid China. If we embedded some telemetry to ping a server outside the 'Great Firewall' with a public-private key... and shutdown if it failed. That might slow down copying.
3) Yes, definitely want it to be easy to use, even for a business without the ability to buy a stand-alone POS. It should work on Android and iOS.
4) Language. Agreed, if we want a lot of commits from outsiders, then we need a popular language. Odoo / Apache Biz and others are python or java. In fact, we should find a way to make writing the business logic even easier. Right now, I need someone with 2 years of programming experiences to change a tax rule in most systems. (x * y) I'm not sure how it could be simpler - maybe web assembly or embedded lua or a custom parser? On the lower-level, Rust might make sense b/c a) crypto-currency keys exposed in memory are a huge security risk, b) it can scale to small devices and compete with the 'embedded' systems like Micros-Fidelio you see in every high-end hotel and restaurant, c) if it's open-source, nobody can get it to compile. ;)
5) Large company is an important target (long-term). One of the problems with the existing systems is that they hack the accounting module and create a huge challenge for integration. We have to do it right.
6) We have Europe's largest POS reseller supporting, a new POS vendor in the U.S. automotive market supporting us, a large U.S. POS vendor in retail and hospitality (+ credit cards) supporting us, and about 50 years of experience in POS systems in-house, a market in SE Asia we can use for testing without too many regulations, and about 80 years of in-house POS knowledge.
For 1) Do we need to open source for every module? About the core module is it build as the library and closed-source?. I think for customization open-source some module can let they modify for extensibility. There is an interesting open-source project of MS The Open-Xml-PowerTool (https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-Xml-PowerTools) that let you easier to create Office XML document but you still need MS Office to be the editor.
For 3) I agree with an idea of distribution to iOS/Android devices. I just worry about If the iOS/Android version changed this will make much effort to support?
Comments on Doc:
Open source means
Selling point
Technical comments