"Kachingo, a customer rewards programme launched last
week, runs on the Linux operating system because, creator Chris
Berryman says, 'you can imagine what the cost would have been for
Microsoft licences'.
The project, four years in the making, involves 500 individual
retail premises and 1700 point of sale terminals.
"Linux has worked very well and we've done some things that
haven't been done before with it," says Berryman.
Kachingo is one of the biggest deployments of the open source
operating system in New Zealand and if plans to roll out the scheme
in other parts of the world are successful, it could be a
significant global Linux-powered system, Berryman says. 'In a
2000-store chain, running Linux will be a big change.'"
