Just curious since I’m considering switching over my store to a new platform (military/LEO tactical gear, not electronics).
I believe it is a custom written software made by SF themselves.
It’s actually a very hacked and modified version of osCommerce (of which ZenCart is a fork of) from what I understand.
Which actually raises an interesting point. Since osCommerce is GPL, SparkFun should really be making the source to their modifications available.
While it would be very nice of them to release any substantive changes that they’ve made, unless the version of osCommerce they started working with was licensed under the GPL v3 (not v2), they’re not required to do so.
I just checked, and the most recent release (as of today) on the [osCommerce website ships with a copy of the GPL v2 in the main LICENSE file of the distribution. So, they’re under no obligation to distribute anything, unless they start selling copies of their version of osCommerce. ;)](http://www.oscommerce.com/)
My fault, I saw GPL and assumed v3 
It started as osCommerce, this is true, but the heavy customization began over four years ago at this point. Very little osCommerce remains and with the next few upcoming deployment cycles we’ll see what little is left completely overhauled. The osCommerce backend was deleted years ago in favor of a completely custom built content management application. As such refering to our system as a modified osCommerce doesn’t accurately describe things anymore.
We do have plans to open source our entire software suite (called SPORK) at some point, but it’s not likely to happen soon. There are too many large subsystems that are slated to be rewritten this year that involve ejecting large swaths of legacy code. When we open this up, it will be clean.
I haven’t been much involved in licensing questions lately, but to the best of my current understanding, even the GPL v3 doesn’t require publishing source modifications to web apps, although I think they’ve done some work to make it compatible with the Affero GPL.
Brennen@SparkFun:
I haven’t been much involved in licensing questions lately, but to the best of my current understanding, even the GPL v3 doesn’t require publishing source modifications to web apps, although I think they’ve done some work to make it compatible with the Affero GPL.
You’re right, it’s Affero I was thinking of, not the plain GPL; not quite sure what I was thinking when I wrote that. (And yeah, both AGPLv3 and GPLv3 source can be combined at this point, “sort of”; see section 13 of each license.)
We do have plans to open source our entire software suite (called SPORK) at some point, but it’s not likely to happen soon. There are too many large subsystems that are slated to be rewritten this year that involve ejecting large swaths of legacy code. When we open this up, it will be clean.
If you do make your store open source then I would like to try it.
As a SF distributor already and I’m using osCommerce hopefully it shouldn’t be too difficult.
sk