Comments on: Open Source ERP Current Releases

By: lognbow

lognbow — Sat, 10 May 2008 22:01:53 +0000

It’s May 11, there website is still kept as saying the community version as for “non-ciritical environment”.

I was trying openbravo for the last couple of weeks. After seeing this post, I think Adempiere should be a better choice for me.

By: Diego LG

Diego LG — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:50:58 +0000

Hi osserpguru!
It’s great to see that someone it’s trying to give a little be of logic and objetive “reviewing” of all ERP/CRM systems offered in the net.
I am an IT consultant and have done mainly CRM Implementations for many customers; Some of them, need to go the extra mile and install an ERP to fullfill al their needs, but the problem I am facing, it’s that all the big players of the “open source” ERP implementations, does not offer a true email integration (or at leaxt it’s what I am seeing…).
All of my customers are used to have all emails comming in and out of the office being tracked for every individual user from the crm;
Do you know any ERP implementation that can handle this requeriment?
what I see in most of the ERP’s, (except for one called OPENTAPS http://www.opentaps.org) it that they use the “tracker” approach, for one or few “department” group email.
Any help regarding this, will be reaaalllly aprecited.
Regards,

Diego LG.

By: rob

rob — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:14:32 +0000

I was pleased to see Paolo's response and the way he has worded it seems reasonable. Unfortunately this still isn't reflected on their website at present (16th March) - see openbravo product comparision

By: osserpguru

osserpguru — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:37:06 +0000

Hi Paolo,
It’s a pleasure to have you on our site!
I am always happy to get feedback from the different projects team members as they know better than anyone what is really going on internally and they can provide a lot of insight.
I was worried with the comment Rob post, as he suggested that the answer he got from Openbravo made him understand that the ‘Communiy Edition’ is not meant for production.
I have no problems with the commercial model of bundling a free,open source software together with support and maintenance and selling that to customers, as long as the software itself can be downloaded and used for free. This model proved itself and I believe it is important for the evolution of open source ERP as a mainstream ERP solution.
What I don’t like is situations such as the one Rob described, where the projects says “this is not for production use, you need to pay for that to be in production” – what we end with is a bunch of people doing QA for the project that cannot go into production and that is detrimental.

By: osserpguru

osserpguru — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:28:20 +0000

Luis – couldn’t agree more, I was surprised to hear that about Openbravo.
It also gives me an idea for future posts – I will contact all projects and ask some question like Rob did and compare the different replies I got from each project. It would be valuable to see how the solutions fair on these issues.

By: osserpguru

osserpguru — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:25:41 +0000

From the open source ERP solutions I currently cover, Adempiere is by far the most ‘true open source’-the project is a group of dedicated developers who’s main focus is to provide a great piece of ERP. Their community is also very active and responsive and they should be credited for that.
Which ERP solution should you choose? There are so many variables to consider and the ‘true open sourceness’ of the project is one of them, although the level of support you get from the community around a project is a very important variable to consider.

By: osserpguru

osserpguru — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:19:13 +0000

Hi Rob,
Thank you for raising this issue. I was un-aware and surprised to here that kind of message coming out of Openbravo. I always thought Openbravo did a decent job in keeping the balance between maintain its open source nature while continuing to evolve on the commercial side and making its investors happy.

By: Paolo Juvara

Paolo Juvara — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:58:04 +0000

I am the Chief Products Officer at Openbravo and I would like to clarify Rob’s comment above and reassure Luis that we completely share his point of view.

It appears that we have some incorrect and conflicting statements on our different sites (our main site, uses the same wording as Rob and our wiki, http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Openbravo_Releases, does not mention Openbravo Network). We will rectify this mistake very shortly.

In reality, Openbravo has three editions:
* Developer’s Edition, based on our development trunk and intended for developers.
* Community Edition, which is free and released with an 100% open source license, which is stable and intended for production usage.
* Openbravo Network, which is a commercial virtual appliance that contains:
1) Openbravo Community Edition (the same software)
2) All the tech stack required to run it
3) Services for automated installation and maintenance
4) Support and warranties

I apologize for the confusion that our site might have created. We will rectify it as soon as possible.

Paolo

By: Luis-tic616

Luis-tic616 — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:16:29 +0000

I’m worried about the comment of Rob. This policy of OpenBravo is, in my opinion, a bomb against the philosophy of Open Source. I can understand the service provided is different depending if you pay a fee or not, but what cannot be different is the software itself – then it is not Open Source!

Rob, could you provide more details please?

By: Unkhas

Unkhas — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:20:40 +0000

I’m following this site with great joy, since I’m an opensource advocate with long experience from commercial ERP systems.
I’ve got most impressed by openbravo so far, but turned to adempiere instead. The reason is that I got no contact at all with the openbravo “community”. No answers in irc and very little info from the guys answering my mails.
Adempiere is such a difference in all those aspects, helpful people indeed. That matters, but in a case of deploying an installation to a paying customer (which I haven’t done with any opensource ERP at all so far) it will demand a lot more from me if I go Adempiere. If I choose Compiere or Openbravo the client will pay for licenses and there will be support to get.

Tough choice