Going Online with osCommerce
November 16th, 2007 
What Shopping cart should I use?
This is usually the first question entrepreneurs ask when planning for an online shop for the first time – and rightly so. The shopping cart determines how easy and expensive going online will be. If you are planning on going online, read on and find out one of the many available shopping carts out there: osCommerce.
What sets osCommerce from others is that it is an open source e-commerce solution. In other words, it’s free. That takes care of the price, but what about the ease of setting it up? It doesn’t take a genius to setup osCommerce. Downloaded as a tarball or zip file, it’s just a matter of extracting the contents into your web server, making sure that PHP and MySQL are both running on it. Also, you need an empty database for osCommerce’s use. Once extracted, proceed to your site on a browser and an install script will get your shop on the way to being online. It must be noted, however, that because it’s open source, documentation isn’t extensive. Full functionality and tighter security is achieved only through the download of different user modules.
osCommerce runs on Linux or Windows with a web server that runs PHP and MySQL. Knowledge of setting up a database is also needed.
Good post but as an evangelist for osCommerce, I want to clarify some points you made …
Open Source is not about the price it is about the licence to use. It may be free to download but that is not the point. The point is that you get the source code to modify as you see fit with few restrictions (only copyright) which is 100% better than rent by the month solutions like Yahoo, Miva and Volusion.
osCommerce wisely does not try to be all things to all stores. It provides a very sound core set of functionality on which people can build. Compared to its clunky forks and restrictive alternatives, users of osCommerce are not presented with an overwhelming Administration Panel full of functionality they may never want to use. They get the basics which they will use and can add on what they need to support their unique business model which is what it is all about.
That is the point of open source and in particular osCommerce. You can apapt it.
As for your security remark, osCommerce is secure and people should not be concerned in any way with using it.