[nflug] Linux Powered Point of Sale

[Erek Dyskant]

>
> At this point, I am just curious as to whether or not there are 
> currently any existing Point Of Sale applications available for 
> Linux?  Preferably one with a MySQL backend.

    Sadly, there's very little open source POS software out there.  Open 
source advocates tend to freely admit that there's an issue with 
vertical applications, as the userbase is so small and doesn't always 
overlap with people who are also programmers. 

    Many of the larger businesses that have serious custom development 
money have gone with linux backends, and a lot of pizza places use One 
Systems, Inc. which is a proprietary system that runs on Linux.

    There's BananaPOS, which was going in the right direction, but seems 
to have stalled, and there's PHP POS, which is web based so it's only 
suited to the lowest transaction counts.  However, Quicken POS, 
Veritouch, and PC America all blow any open source application out the 
window in this area.  My advice is to either go the roll your own route 
or steer your customers to one of these and avoid giving open source 
applications a bad reputation by having people use less than mature ones.

    There's definitely an opportunity for someone to write a fully 
featured open source POS system, make it into a super simple 
distribution, and sell support and hardware for it.  Maybe Corey could 
consider nudging his friend who does the liquor store systems in that 
direction.

    As for Mysql vs Postgres, the answer is have your cake and eat it 
too.  A system like ideally this should ideally use a database 
abstraction layer, so that it can be used with whatever each DBA is most 
comfortable with.  Failing that, I really don't care since half of the 
users will be disappointed that it doesn't use their DB of choice, get 
over it, and learn a little about their less favorite DB.

    Enough rambling for the moment.

--Erek