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I have a client who wants an auction system in PHP, "just like eBay".

 

Does anyone know of an open source one that is good?... or at least decent?

 

Damn, an open source version of Ebay. No wonder they've gone out of buisness, oh wait.

 

There are Ebay clones out there, but aren't licensed, nor legal.

I actually had a "potential client" not that long a go who was in the same boat and wanted bids to customize one of these to be just like eBay.  Feel free to re-use my response to him.

 

Sorry the free scripts you're finding aren't as good as eBay.  eBay's 2008 development budget was $725,600,000 (http://investor.ebay.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=950134-09-3306).  What percentage of this were you hoping to have all of these same features built for?

I actually had a "potential client" not that long a go who was in the same boat and wanted bids to customize one of these to be just like eBay.  Feel free to re-use my response to him.

I wouldn't say that is a fair response. eBay's features are not hard to re-create, although the logic in an auction system is somewhat tricky.

The fact that eBay's development budget is so high is that their system has to cater for millions of users, span across thousands of servers, process billions of images, store billions of database records across god knows how many database servers and have a complete user API.

So, if your client said they wanted xyz feature just like eBay does then you cannot say, well it cost eBay a million dollars to do that so how much do you want to pay.

Yeah - the other thing to keep in mind is that eBay is going to have staff, which is going to be far more expensive than outsourcing. Everything eBay did in 2008 had to be done without causing downtime, while the system ran.

 

Still, it is frustrating to see that projects that, in 2002 would have had 4 developers working for a year and a half, are now expected to be done in a month or two by one guy (for no money)

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