Open Source ERP Guru

As part of our open source ERP Installation Guides series, we will walk through the installation of Postbooks, an ERP solution from Xtuple.

The Business Software Hybrid Model

Xtuple took a path which is becoming increasingly popular among business software vendors – adopting a hybrid model, combining free,open source offering along with proprietary, commercial products. This trend, of companies selling commercial products while releasing some of the code as open source, emphasizes the strength of the open source movement, especially in the context of business software – these companies understand they can benefit from the advantages of the communities flourishing around open source projects. The licensing fees these companies loose due to the free distribution of their software is covered by services they offer around these strong products.

Back to Postbooks, it is the younger sibling of OpenMFG, a mature, well established manufacturing solution. Postbooks focuses on Accounting and CRM, complementing OpenMFG’s strong manufacturing module. You can see from our own open source ERP projects activity trends page that Postbooks is a very active project with over 400 daily downloads.

As I always do before installing open source ERP software, before of going to the projects’ Sourceforge download area,I first visit its official website.

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One of the most important evaluation criteria for open source ERP is project activity. The Sourceforge graveyard is full of open source projects skeletons. When you measure a projects activity, the most important thing to measure is trends, or the rate of change in the parameters you measure.

In the last few days, I have been collecting data from the Sourceforge statistics RSS. The following graph displayes the number of downloads per day for the most popular open source ERP projects (this is still Beta so numbers might vary):

Please remember that the statistics were not checked thoroughly so actual numbera might vary!.

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If you read my post 3 Core Business Processes Open Source ERP Must Support you already know that there are at least 402 open source software projects listed as ERP solutions in Sourceforge. You also know what are the core scenarios a real ERP solution should support.
One of Open Source ERP Guru’s main objectives is to provide valuable information for companies looking into ERP solutions in general and open source ERP solutions in particular, and the first thing to do is to narrow the list of 402 down to a more manageable number.
The following is a list of open source ERP solutions that can be called ‘true’ ERP, are open source and (at least partly) freely available:

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