Open Source ERP Comes of Age

Earlier this year, I called open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) the “Cinderella of the business free software world”. But even then, I was aware of considerable activity in this sector, and that it was a matter of “when” rather than “if” ERP made its big breakthrough into the mainstream....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is this Open ERP's Big Breakthrough?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Openbravo Acquires Librepos

Here's a classic example of an open source micro-acquisition:

This acquisition will benefit the Librepos community of users and developers for several reasons. First, the continuation of Librepos is now guaranteed, Librepos will be an independent product of the Openbravo portfolio hosted in Sourceforge, and is and will be open source and licensed under the GPL. Forums will continue actively and there will be frequent releases of Librepos. Openbravo is a company truly committed to open source and believes in the strengths of the community to drive innovation.

Second, I will continue to be involved in the future of Librepos. I am the founder and main developer of Librepos since I published Librepos in January 2005. Now I joined Openbravo as Senior Architect and Librepos is part of my responsibilities. This is also great for me because previously to this acquisition I used to spend my spare time on Librepos, now I will have more time for Librepos, because now Librepos is part of my job.

One of the biggest problems with young open source projects that depend on one or a few key coders is ensuring their survival and continuity. Being bought is one obvious way to do that, with the benefits listed above. In fact, the benefits are far greater in the case of a small open source project than they are for a small closed-source product company.

As the comment above points out, open source projects, even successful ones, are often part-time jobs for the coders - something that is rarely the case in the world of traditional software. Bringing several smaller software projects together, as with Openbravo and Librepos, really is a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

What's Wikipedia Got Against Open Source?

This is curious:

In case you didn't notice, Openbravo does not have an entry in the English edition of the Wikipedia, the fine community driven encyclopedia.

For some reason, the word Openbravo has been "blacklisted" and any attempt to create an entry about Openbravo gets automatically deleted.

Given the open source-y nature of Wikipedia, you would have thought it would have had a natural tendency to look favourably on open source companies like Openbravo. So what gives, Jimmy?

Open Solutions Alliance

Another day, another open source organisation:

The Open Solutions Alliance consists of leading companies dedicated to making enterprise-class open source software solutions work together. We help customers put open source solutions to work by enabling application integration, certifying quality solutions, and promoting cooperation among open source developers. Membership is open to organizations that provide high-quality, business-ready open source solutions.

More specifically, it consists of companies like CentricCRM (customer relations management), Hyperic (systems management), JasperSoft (business intelligence) and OpenBravo (enterprise resource management), as well as more general open source players like CollabNet and SpikeSource.

What's striking about these is that together they form pretty much a complete open source enterprise stack of the kind I wrote about half a year ago. This is something we're going to see much more of, as individual open source companies start banding together to present a common front in order to satisfy the demands of large companies who want integrated, working solutions, not a ragtag bunch of codebases.