Domain name and hosting company NetRegistry has selected the locally-developed Freeway open source e-commerce system to resell to its customer base.

NetRegistry chose Freeway after an "extensive review" of eight potential e-commerce platforms and plans to resell the products to its customers who need online stores.

Freeway is developed by Brisbane-based ZacWare, and was formerly known as osCommRes, a fork of the open source osCommerce.

ZacWare CEO Damien Hickey said Freeway is the world's most advanced open source e-commerce system for bookings and events - not only selling products online, but also services, events and subscriptions.

"As Freeway was released under the GPL open source licence system, it guarantees long-term supportability and adaptability - the nature of Freeway will enable NetRegistry to gain access to a world-wide open source developer network," Hickey said.

Hickey said huge changes are about to take place in the e-commerce software space with regards to Visa's Payment Application Best Practices (PABP) certification.

From January 1, 2008, Visa will introduce a series of mandates to eliminate the use of non-secure payment applications from the Visa payment system.

"ZacWare's Freeway e-commerce system is already compliant with these measures," he said.

NetRegistry chief operating officer Brett Fenton said Freeway is a natural fit for the company.

"By dealing with an Australian company, NetRegistry will be able to access a level of instant technical support that is much harder to reach when outsourcing overseas," Fenton said. "In addition, the open source nature of Freeway meant that ZacWare was happy to take our suggestions on board and adapt the software to suit our needs. This two-way dialogue will not only benefit NetRegistry, but our customers." NetRegistry will begin to deploy Freeway eCommerce in January, 2008.

ZacWare plans to expand its services to include a security monitoring tool for daily Visa PABP certification status of Freeway merchants.

The company is also developing an enterprise-grade hotel booking module which will remove a hotel's dependency on "high cost", hosted booking systems.