Linux Canada Inc. unveils International
POS Development Project

Linux Canada Inc. have been working with Linux since 1994. Their SCO Unix based application, Retailer's Choice, was converted to run on Linux and the first Linux installation was in 1995. The feature set, quality, and reliability of Linux make it an excellent O/S for the mission critical retail environment.

Over the years retail organizations have been plagued with the comings and goings of small software companies. The product offerings have been extremely expensive as have been the support and maintenance contracts. Source code has been extremely over-protected as if it were a sacred treasure. Many software companies have gone by the way-side leaving their retail customers without support, service or source, forcing them to look for alternatives.

POS Development Project

The main reason that no retail point of sale product has emerged as the de-facto standard world wide is because of the vast differences that exist in language, currency and taxes. Until now it has been impossible for any one company to develop and keep up with the ever changing retail environment. Consequently, retail applications tend to be targeted to finite geographic areas and specific retail verticals.

The POS Development Project unveiled by Linux Canada Inc. will change all of that. Rather than the developers in Alberta, Canada trying to build a product for the world, the source code will be released to the world allowing the resources of the world to develop what is needed. All development projects will be registered with Linux Canada Inc. Developers will check in source code with Linux Canada Inc. who will ensure quality and reliability. In addition developers will provide a log of their hours spent on the project. Linux Canada Inc. will provide, in return, a credit to the developer which can be applied to the purchase of LinuxPOS and LinuxRETAIL licenses.

This is believed to be a very unique commercial endeavor. The model allows Linux Canada Inc. to maintain ownership rights to their software while providing value-added resellers, dealers, and retail chains the following:

- stability that only Linux can provide

- flexibility to add the features and functions that are needed

- peace of mind of solid local support

- features and functions added by other developers around the world

- quality product at a low price

LinuxPOS is a revolutionary point-of-sale application, bringing tremendous functionality and a dynamic user interface to the retail market place. LinuxPOS was written in Tcl/tk which has excellent GUI capabilities, a strong feature set, and which comes complete with source code. In a true client/server relationship, LinuxPOS queries the server on a real-time basis. However LinuxPOS also maintains a complete database of its own. Should the server happen to fail, LinuxPOS continues running using its internal data and will automatically synchronize with the server when it returns.

LinuxRETAIL is a new inventory control software package written in Java. Java provides strong GUI capabilities through the Swing API and also provides important features such as threading and networking which are vital for a server product. This package is still under construction and will be released for beta testing in the May/June time frame.

Linux Canada Inc. is a privately owned corporation based in Sundre, Alberta, Canada. Dedicated to Linux, the company is also a Red Hat distributor, and is the Canadian distributor for Cyclades port cards, routers and terminal servers.

Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.