Which merchants benefit most from open source?

Michael Valverde, CEO of Chain Reaction Ecommerce, based near downtown Atlanta, said his company is focusing more on community contributions with its latest release, but truly small merchants might want to consider a SaaS solution.

"We have 12,000 people on our forums. They're very active," he said. "There are a few hundred freelancers working on the site. We're open source no matter what. Our goal is to bring base line code that you can plug modules on top of it."

Chain Reaction builds code for both the front-end and the back-end of the shop, and it has 450 templates with support for Algozone templates.

On the transaction end Chain Reaction offers its own transaction processing, plus 20 other gateways with ControlScan support.

The latest version of the software has several community contributions, Valverde said, and with 170,000 merchants now using the software you should "watch this space" for more community support.