Oceanside POS® is built upon Microsoft’s .Net Framework and the .Net Framework is an open source initiative. However, the point-of-sale source code that we license to our customers is proprietary technology that we have developed, supported and updated since 2009.

Any support libraries that are used by Oceanside POS, for example libraries used to access common database systems, does not have a software license that forces us, or our customers to disclose any of our or our customers own unique source code to anyone. To put this another way, we avoid using any “helper” libraries that would force us or our own customers to share their contributions back to the open source community.

We support open source software by making financial contributions to groups such as the Open Source Collective. However, POS software design is a very labor intensive process with a niche audience that requires on-going support and updates that could not be maintained without the financial support of our customers.

No, when you buy the application, you can deploy it as many times as you desire.

When we first started Oceanside Software Corporation®, our business model was focused on building our own value added reseller network to sell point-of-sale software that we designed from the ground up. We continued that business model from 2009 to 2012, deploying for the first time in 2010.

During those first 3 years we began to realize that our business was sliding from being a software development firm, into a company that spent most of our time selling and supporting existing software rather than innovating new software.

From around 2013 forward we pivoted and began licensing our source code to other entities who generally have more experience in deploying, supporting and growing value added reseller networks. We have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge working with our customers and the software has benefited as a result.

To pivot back to the original question, our first deployment was in 2010, but the software has continue to mature and has lead to other versions that we have yet to list on our website (including the core of a retail solution).

The base code for the software application was validated against PCI-DSS 2.0 with the PCI Security Standards Council in 2011 under the name Oceanside POS®. After we began licensing our source code to third parties changed our design from in-scope to out-of-scope because customer’s of our source code would have had to go through the same certification as us, even if they didn’t change a line of code. The software now uses out-of-scope processing libraries, but with its modular design, our customers could insert their own processing mechanism, including in-scope processing, if desired. (Note that we do not require you to use any processor that we are affiliated with.)

C# .Net Framework (Call to ask us which version, we generally try to keep up with the latest releases.)

The core of the application was developed by our CEO, Jason Brower between 2009 and 2012. However, that core has been continually improved with the most dramatic changes occurring when Microsoft announced .Net Core / .Net 5.0.

We are an Engineering firm that will integrate or write code that can communicate with any API or device that you contract us to communicate with, but the goal of our business model is to help your engineers implement your own vision of a pos system using our modular components.

Although the application was initially built for restaurants, some of our customers do and have used the source code to create a retail design. We do own the intellectual property rights to the core of a retail system that is not advertised on our website because it has not been tested through extensive deployments. Call us for more details, we can assure you that it will save your teams significant ramp-up time when developing your own retail system. (We have been hard at work on new designs that will be more inclusive of retail centric features.)

We recommend using the latest version of Microsoft’s SQL Server (the free version is acceptable), but older versions of SQL server will also work. However, the software was architected using an object relational mapper (ORM) known as Entity Framework and Entity Framework has database providers for other Database Services and in-process technologies such as SQLite.

The software will work with almost all North American Credit Card Processors, but we do not require you to use any of our preferred methods of processing transactions. (For example, we have at least one customer who is a major ISO for First Data, they use their own processing integration.)