CubeCart 4.0 Released Today (9/11/2007)

CubeCart 4.0 has been released. Unfortunately, the 4.0 version cannot be had for free. There is a 14-Day full featured trial and then it will cost you. However, the 3.0 branch will remain free as long as you keep the Copyright Link in the footer.

Personally, I think I am going to wait for Magento to stabilize.

Magento may start charging one day

The way I see it, is that it’s the only way for Opensource : Alpha, Beta and the first few v1x versions are free, so that the users can help bug fixed, contribute to the project (in positive sense), then it becomes stable and there comes a major update, the team started introducing a paid version.
If everybody knows the principal of ’give back’ and practise it religiously, then the core developers will have enough money to put food on dinner tables, and one week vacation a year perhaps, then many Opensource application will remained free.

Unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way Many web designers will not give away freebie for their clients, but they feel righteously alright to use opensource software, and charge a lot but never give a dime, and always constantly looking for free opensource to use on their clients’ site.

There are many open source models that have staid open source well into stable versions. Too many to list in fact. Usually the way developers support themselves is by selling their services and support based on their expertise they have gained by developing these open source projects.

Further, CubeCart was never "open source" to my knowledge. You were allowed to run a version for free as long as the Copyright Notice remained in place and had to pay for the privilege of having that notice removed. However, you were never free to make derivative works off of their code as it was still not open source. Regardless, the intent of my original post was not to argue the merits of open source versus non open source code (admittedly not made that clear); but the line about waiting for Magento was based on the fact that I looked through the 4.0 version, and think that Magento will be leaps and bounds beyond it when made stable.