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!

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.

The database schema for osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 has been updated to include foreign key relationships between related tables. This update allows MySQL to natively support foreign keys on InnoDB databases that are directly defined in the database schema, and uses a fallback mechanism for MyISAM databases where foreign key relationships are defined in a database table.

Foreign key relationships allows records to be linked together through multiple database tables, for example, linking products to categories. Until now, when a product was to be deleted using the Administration Tool, extra PHP code had to be written within the delete function to also delete entries in other database tables that shared a relationship with the product being deleted.

This is fine for standard installations where the relationships between database tables are known, however when add-ons create new database tables during installation, changes were required in core source code files to also perform database actions on the tables they created.

Now with foreign key relationships, changes to core source code files are no longer required and changes to the related database tables are performed natively on InnoDB databases or automatically through the database class for MyISAM databases. This cleans the codebase considerably and allows one simple query to take care of the whole database. For example:

delete from osc_products where products_id = 1

This one simple query now automatically takes care of deleting the product language definitions, product reviews, category assignments, special prices, shopping cart entries, and any other product table relationships without any additional queries or PHP code necessary.

The following foreign key constraints are supported for MyISAM databases for both ON UPDATE and ON DELETE operations:

• CASCADE, automatically update or delete child records when a parent record is being updated or deleted (eg, delete all product related information when a product is being deleted)
• SET NULL, automatically sets the child record field value to null when a parent record is being updated or deleted (eg, clear the product manufacturer value when a manufacturer is being deleted)
• RESTRICT, prevents a parent record from being updated or deleted if child records depend on it (eg, don’t allow order status levels to be deleted if they are in use by orders)

Add-On developers can take advantage of foreign keys by defining relationships directly in the database schema for InnoDB databases, and by entering relationships in the osc_fk_relationships table for MyISAM databases. Examples of foreign keys defined in the osc_fk_relationships table are:

The osc_fk_relationships table is only used for MyISAM databases and is used by the database class to check on the defined constraints when UPDATE and DELETE queries are being performed.

There are currently 68 foreign key relationships defined that will be introduced in the osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Beta 1 release.

The changes are currently available in my development branch at GitHub and will be pushed to the main development branch after further testing and code clean up has been performed. My branch is available at:

http://github.com/haraldpdl/oscommerce/

Documentation on MySQL’s foreign key implementation can be found here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-foreign-key-constraints.html