With the possibility of buying a business, I started looking at point of sale programs. The goal is to find something usable, and then resell it.

I found a nice open source program that I was thinking I could customize, and then include it in a package deal with some equipment, like bar code scanners and cash drawers. The goal is to also sell the complete hardware to get everything to work.

Today, I was testing some hardware along with the open source software…it failed hard. The hardware was the issue, as it didn’t seem to want to support anything needed to get the software to run.

It was a prototype, so the hardware wasn’t even the real hardware that would be used, but it was similar enough to just let me test. The prototype seems a little better than what I would actually go with, so it’s a bit concerning that this failed so hard.

There’s also the problem that if the sale of the business goes through, I will still need some kind of system in place, so that made this test extra disappointing.