[iharris]

I've worked for a POS company for five years and boy, do I have some stories about the industry! I definitely agree with the OP that the market is littered with terrible products that were knocked together in VB or Delphi, overpriced, and put together with little consideration for actual use cases.

With that said, I don't think that there exists a 'one size fits all' solution. For small and medium retailers without their own IT staff, a service contract makes a lot of sense (consider hardware failure or a corrupted database, or re-training on the system's admin functionality for example). These guys often have a very large inventory and I doubt that a lightweight product (eg Square Register) can manage it elegantly. Unfortunately the needs of these retailers often result in a huge, enterprise-y solution that is both cumbersome and expensive to maintain.

Large retail franchises generally hire firms to tailor a POS product for them, service it, and integrate it into their existing ecosystem (SAP, PeopleSoft etc.).

I think the small retailer market is really interesting and some newcomers like Square Register are shaking things up. Small retailers are often family-owned and really need a product that works out of the box, is easy to configure and use, accepts credit cards, and is very inexpensive. If the POS is designed intelligently then there retailer can probably run the entire thing themselves as long as they don't need special features (think gas stations, loyalty programs, and other markets like hospitality).

I think the OP's project looks awesome and it seems to be targeted at small businesses with low- to medium throughput and where the manager is reasonably technical (see the reviews from the SourceForge page where people dont know how to set it up - these folks probably need a ready-made solution or a consultant). I could also see consultants taking this and extending it to compete with a lot of the existing products out there, which I would be really excited to see!

[moron4hire]

You've caught on exactly on one of my desires for this project. If you need parts A, B, C and D, then it should matter where you get each of them, they should just all work together. If you're savvy enough to run you're own back-office, I want you to be able to. If not, I want your neighbor to be the person who is running it for you.

As I said in some of my other replies, I want to engender a market of choice. Right now, you can plunk hugeo cash down on an SAP system, you can go with some fly-by-night local operation that has written their own software, or you can go with Square who are just as monolithic as SAP but prettier and cheaper.

Long term, I have my eyes on SAP and other ERP snake-oil salesmen, too. Really, how many different ways can you present basic inventory management and analysis? It's a centuries old problem and it's not rocket science. Companies like SAP and Oracle annoy the shit out of me, too.