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Open source ERP? Don't hold your breath

Posted by ralph on · 8 comments
Search SAP; By Joshua Greenbaum
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I recently took a briefing from a company called OpenMFG, with the distinct hope that my skepticism about the role of open source in the ERP market would be dashed.

this early-stage vendor purports to have the first open source ERP product on the market. It's definitely an ERP product, albeit one that is considerably less functional than many. But when you dig under the covers, the reality is that OpenMFG's so-called open source process is not much different than any other vendor's software development process. OpenMFG was built, to give them credit, on top of a healthy assortment of open source tools. But the initial development was done by OpenMFG employees, and the upgrade and enhancement process, while purporting to be open source, is really just a clever modification of the way software has always been enhanced.

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Comments (8)

This "article" is one long non-sequitur. The company does not yet have a large developer base, so what. This is a problem for many open source projects and no fault of the guys at OpenMFG.
The author is not quite there with reguard to open source software. He seems to have an agenda or a bias he may not even know he has. This is fairly common with business types looking at open source for the first time. Rarely have they done their home work. Everything to them is a trick. Given his background, of course he's afraid someone is trying to rip him off.

It's sad really. If this was 1500 AD, he'd be one of the ones questioning Columbus. I can hear it now, "You had to have sailed south. There's nothing to the west. Liar."

God must have loved these clowns, he made so many of them.
ralph Story submitter ·
Your comments make me wonder how to read this article. I took the author pretty much at his word and thought he was describing a company that did not quite understand open source software. But, I see that maybe the author just does not get open source software. Or, maybe he was trying to explain it to people he thought had no understanding of open source development models and he dumbed it down too much.
OpenMFG is not Open Source software, and the company is not an Open Source company.
Yes, I thought I recognized the OpenMFG name from a previous article. Aren't they the guys that actively solicit patches (with transfer of copyright, of course) from their users, include the ones they like in their product, and give nothing back?

Sort of like MySQL AB, except there's no OSS version of the software.
Dino: That doesn't take away from the issue I have with the author.

If you wrote the article, would you start off with "OpenMFG is not Open Source software, and the company is not an Open Source company". Or would you say, "Open source ERP? Don't hold your breath".

But then, I'm no longer interested in the anti-opensource spin. So, I still maintain the guys shills.
Tom -

It was an article about OpenMFG, so, I would start with OpenMFG.

As to Open Source ERP, it's been a while since I took a look, but aren't there a couple of actual Open Source projects? Is Compiere one of them?
As Groucho Marx once asked "WHY WON'T SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING TO HELP ME?"

Plenty of open source ERP out there.

Don't move back to Texas. The state is not big enough.

On second thought, just let me know if you do, so I can move out.

ROFL.

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