There it was in front of my eyes. The headline in osCommerce's forum read, "Is OsC Dead?, Discussion of the Progress of OsC" [link removed by osCommerce folks?]. Despite how some may read the title, the thread isn't about bashing osCommerce. Instead, it is about users and community members concerned and even fearful of the slow pace of new development for osCommerce. Despite all the talk about osCommerce 3.0, it has been a year and a half since OsC 3 Alpha 4 was released with the roadmap showing that Alpha 5 and 6 are still under development. How can one not ask if the future of osCommerce is in jeopardy?
As mentioned at the osCommerce forum, Kerry Watson also has an article out about the new breed of open source shopping carts. The article starts off with a that was then, this is now statement regarding shopping carts.
While the Big Three of the old guard — osCommerce, Zen Cart, and CRE Loaded — continue to duke it out among themselves, new-generation open source commerce projects have begun to spring up with new ideas and new ways of thinking. Most noteworthy of the new crop are France-based Prestashop and US-based programs Ubercart and Magento.
These fresh Web 2.0-style carts are mature and production-ready contenders, and all are at or beyond version 1.0 in their production cycle. These carts are equal or superior to many commercial e-commerce programs, and are available for free under the GNU or OSL 3.0 Public License. We've previously reviewed Magento, so this column will focus on the other two next-generation carts: PrestaShop and Ubercart.
Personally, I've been working on recommending a friend to upgrade his osCommerce site to either Magento or Drupal's Ubercart. Even when the 3.0 version of osCommerce is released, it will likely still not have many of the Web 2.0 features that the new breed of shopping carts currently have now. It's not that I think osCommerce is dead, but I do think that osCommerce has stopped evolving. Good open source projects never die, they just fade away.