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A Better Way to Build and Distribute Software
CRE Loaded began as an open source project through the addition of many new features and capabilities to the OSCommerce shopping cart engine. CRE Loaded was developed internally and also welcomed contributions by the open source community under the Open Source General Public License (GPL). This early effort created a "loaded" fork of OSCommerce which proved to be a more robust, scalable shopping cart software, which we called CRE Loaded.
Although some customers require more sophisticated applications for their online store and a software solution that is supported by a professional development and service organization, there are many online store owners and entrepreneurs who are comfortable with a community-supported shopping cart solution. That is why CRE Loaded has continued to improve and deliver make available its open source community-supported free version, CRE Loaded Standard.
Customers can download CRE Loaded Standard for free in order to evaluate what CRE Loaded has to offer in its most basic form, and then fully engage with CRE Loaded Professional or CRE Loaded B2B when they are ready for a commercial relationship. In this way, CRE Loaded Standard allows us to be more responsive to costly and time-consuming enterprise sales activities while allocating more toward engineering and development (more than 70% our company is involved in R&D and customer support). CRE Loaded Standard and our online demo capabilities allow store owners worldwide to experience the CRE Loaded commitment to creating value for store owners as well as the open source web development community. Incorporating complementary product partnerships and custom development forums into our entire product line enhances CRE Loaded's commitment to safe and secure ecommerce success.
Flexibility, not artificial restrictions and vendor lock-in
Some software vendors often create artificial restrictions in order to lock customers into their product. Not all web developers and store owners agree with confusing statements from Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors, such as “the future of software is no software at all,” and from traditional client/server vendors who pronounce that open source is “IP socialism.” These are obviously exaggerations and should be viewed as such.
On-Demand is important, but it is only one way to deploy software. We offer customers the choice between on-demand and download options because it gives them the flexibility to meet the needs of their particular business model. If a vendor tells customers they absolutely need to go with SaaS or On-Demand software, it is more about their own business model than it is about the customer’s. The opposite is also true: when a vendor cautions a customer against going with an On-Demand software service, it is usually because that vendor does not offer SaaS…yet.
Open source is a democratizing force, not a socialistic one. If a product is strong and meets a need, an open source license allows the product to reach more people. Open Source creates a community, enlarges markets and allows innovation to flourish. That is why CRE Loaded Standard has been downloaded over 200,000 times to power e-stores all over the world.
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