Have you guys seen the preview of the default Magento homepage? Have a look at the latest news feed from them.

What do you think of that?

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Lawrence

It looks very sleek, do we know what the costs will be though, if any?

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Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Fairtrade Clothes
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

It's Open Source

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Lawrence

Hi everyone, some familar faces on here.

Sorry to be dim, especially as I have just arrived, but what does Open Source mean?

Hi Buzz, welcome to the forum.

Open source means that the source code for the application is available for everyone to use and adjust to their own requirements. There are sometimes restrictions on redistribution and removal of copyright notices etf, but in general you can customise it to your own requirements.

In practise what this means for a general user is that it is free.

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Lawrence

For more detailed information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software

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Lawrence

That is great news Lawrence and I will be watching this with interest. I always struggle to see what the designer gets out of this arrangement though. Is it likely to be free for a limited time only? How do they get paid for all the time and effort they put in?

They get paid by supplying services for the S/W, running adverts on their site doing professional installs and customisations for clients. Don't worry about them, they will still earn from it.
Linux, Apache (the webserver that most of the internet uses), ZenCart, osCommerce, MySQL etc, etc are all open source and have been for years. Yahoo and Sony use FreeBSD for their webservers which is open source, so just because it's free doesn't mean that it's not as good as some of the commercial versions, in fact often the opposite is true.

Once it's open source and in the wild they cannot charge for it later unless they change the licensing when they release a later version. Any version that is released as open source will always be open source.

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Lawrence

im currently deciding which to use and trying to get both going on my server to be able to try out, but since you guys know much more here (i just signed up here) i wanted to ask your opinions in magento vs facecart...
1 which is prettier eg more skinnable?
2 which is more functional?
3 whats the advantage of a java cart?