What Happened to OpenCCVS?

musicmaster asks: "Do you know what happened to OpenCCVS (Open Credit Card Verification system). Originally it was built by Dave Cinege (original homepage). After he stopped working on it about mid-1999 it was taken over by BlackHoleSun, whose site now contains the message that work has ceased since 'many legal snags and licensing issues' didn't justify the effort. OpenCCVS is a clone of CCVS (originally located at www.hks.net, now taken over by Red Hat and placed here). Although Red Hat publishes some of the source to buyers it is not Open Source." Are there any other free software projects developing credit card verification systems?

blackholesun source

[ThwartedEfforts]

Anyone know where I can get the source that blackholesun was working on?

Seems to have just disapeared

[ecsmith]

My business partner and I wanted to help out OCCVS. In fact the company that services my Merchant account were willing to help get me specs to write in additional protocols.
I wrote to the developers weeks ago and never heard back. Then the other day everything just disappeared.
Too bad the reason I went back was to to DL the source to work on it myself. I guess I might never get it now. If anyone has a mirror of it could they possibly post it here?

Thanks.

some of the challenges...

[justins]

First, I actually don't know anything about OpenCCVS. I've played with CCVS a bit, and worked for a company that made a very similar product a while back.

The biggest obstacle to this would be certification of the product. A software credit-card processing product needs to be certified with each credit card "processor" (aka clearinghouse) for each type of transaction that will be processed - mail order, retail, hotel, restaurant, etc. This process entails product review and/or QA by the processing network to make sure the product basically works okay with their network.

Maintaining the certification relationship with all the processors was a HUGE deal where I used to work. It costs money and time, it requires lots of diplomacy, and if your product is "decertified" then merchants using your software will get a degraded "discount rate" when they process transactions, and they will become very unhappy. In other words, certification is life for this kind of product.

Most processors will require you to sign an NDA before you can get a copy of their specs. If you release code to your product you're probably violating the terms of your NDA. Unfortunately the more popular processors seem more likely to have strict NDA rules.

You don't really want to get involved in legal tangles with Visanet or somebody, since they really do have all the money in the world to pursue those who irritate them. This was all expected to change when the SET protocol became popular, but it never did.

Wasted effort...

[jea6]

I believe one serious stumbling block would be the certifications necessary to transmit auth/settlement requests through the third party processors. The certification process is not cheap or fast.

Sourcecode still available

[musicmaster]

The original source is still available on the site of Psychosis: ftp://ftp.psychosis.com/openccvs.

Cashcow project

[musicmaster]

Another interesting project is the Danish Cashcow project (http://www.cashcow.dk/Home/).