osCommerce

We have successfully defended our Trademark and Copyright against eCommerce Ventures Ltd who blatantly registered “osCommerce” as a trademark in the United Kingdom and tried to “pass off” as being osCommerce.

With owning the trademark registration, the firm, comprised of members that were active and are known to many on our community support forums, contacted a number of our former team members, Corporate Sponsors, and community members and gave a deadline of 4 days to respond to handing over domains, ceasing any business relationships with us, and to replace links pointing to our website with theirs.

With the help of the Free Software Foundation Europe / Freedom Task Force of seeking legal aid in the United Kingdom, we appointed Beck Greener as our legal counsel and started legal proceedings against the firm.

As this not only affected our community of store owners and developers but also how Open Source projects and solutions operate, we decided to be open on this issue and to keep the community informed of every step we were taking.

Before our legal counsel could send the first letter, the firm had informally sent us a proposal to quickly resolve the issue of agreeing to let them continue owning the trademark registration and assured its use for SEO purposes only.

As we could obviously not agree to those terms, our legal counsel formerly replied with our demands that were successfully used as a base to later settle out of court.

This included ceasing usage of the osCommerce name, ceasing further distribution of their software and add-ons infringing on our copyright, and to surrender the trademark they had registered.

The support given by the community during this course was truly amazing. We’d like to thank everyone here and in international communities for their support and are immensely proud to have such a caring community! Thank you for being part of it!

We’re kickstarting our public meetings again with a meet-up in London on Friday 11th December 2009 at the Match Bar West End (Oxford Circus) from 5pm onwards. This will be a casual no-presentation meet-up to meet, mingle, and have a few drinks with store owners, developers, and enthusiasts part of our community located in and around London.

Attending osCommerce team members and associates include:

Harald Ponce de Leon
Nick Weisser
Mark Evans
Matthijs van der Vegte

If you would like to meet us and other community members in person, please confirm your attendance at our Facebook page event here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=166087012682

Please note that this bar requires a minimum age of 18 to enter. Some shared selections will be available to snack on. Those attending will need to pay for their own drink and additional food orders.

Date and Time:

Friday 11th December 2009 from 5pm onwards

Location:

Match Bar West End
37-38 Margaret Street
London W1G 0JF
Nearest Tube: Oxford Circus
Website: http://www.matchbar.com/match_bar_westend.php

We look forward to meeting you!

Sage Pay and osCommerce have partnered to release certified versions of the Sage Pay Form, Server and Direct payment modules to the osCommerce community. This partnership enables merchants to securely process card transactions with the UK’s largest indepenent payment service provider whilst utilising Sage Pay’s latest protocol and product offerings.

The Sage Pay Server module has been updated to include the recently released iframe capability which offer merchants a seamless checkout flow without the customer perception of being redirected away to a hosted payment page. This solution also minimises PCI compliance requirements as no card data is ever stored, processed or transmitted from the merchant’s website.

The certified modules will be included as standard modules in the osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 release and are available now as add-ons for existing store owners from v2.2 Milestone 2 onwards.

The certified modules are available for free at the osCommerce Add-Ons site:

http://addons.oscommerce.com/service/sage_pay

To compliment the release of the new modules, Sage Pay are offering all osCommerce merchants an introductory 3 months free gateway fees for new Sage Pay sign ups, designed to save osCommerce users money on their transaction processing costs.

OFFER: 3 months free unlimited Sage Pay processing when you sign up to Sage Pay – Saving a minimum of £60! Promotion code “osc223″ Apply here!

The name “osCommerce” has been registered as a Trademark in the United Kingdom by eCommerce Ventures Ltd. The Trademark registration number 2512693 can be found here:

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tm/t-find/t-find-number?detailsrequested=C&trademark=2512693

This is a continued effort of a derivative group titled “The New osCommerce Project” (now “The osCommerce Project”) to try and take over and own the success of osCommerce which we all have, as a community, worked hard on in the past 9 years since the start of osCommerce in March 2000.

This is being addressed legally and are confident that we will prevail in defending and protecting our rights.

If you have been addressed by eCommerce Ventures Ltd concerning their registration of the “osCommerce” Trademark, please contact legal@oscommerce.com and forward the relevant communication means you were contacted with.

A topic on our community support forums exists where you can provide support and feedback:

http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=343171

We will keep the community officially informed of our legal defense through our blogs and newsletter.

Thank you for all of your continued support!

The community support forums is currently unavailable due to the server experiencing hardware related problems, and will be back online tomorrow.

The maintenance of the server hosting the community support forums also affects the add-ons site where developers will have to wait until the server is back online to be able to upload their add-ons again.

This blogging entry will be updated with further information during the maintenance period.

Update:

The maintenance of the server has completed successfully and is back online in full operation.