The impact of open source

Around 20 years ago when I first was getting into software development there was far fewer options in the open source world in general. At that time if you were doing "boring" line of business work there were very few open source options that were mature enough for the average software manager to feel comfortable risking adopting.

When I took the first steps into properly writing software I got quite interested in Linux. Even at that time there were a number of good options for doing web related development on Linux. Aside from a few brief attempts of writing things in Basic my first proper software code was written in PHP on a Linux stack sometime around 2005.

One of the first services to offer distributed version control software to open source projects was BitKeeper. In 2005 there was a scandal that involved the version control software that was being used by the Linux kernel project where the free license of BitKeeper was removed for the Linux project. This caused development of alternatives to start and massively improved distributed version control. This event was of enormous significance as it was the start of a number of high profile cases of open source software coming to be much better than the paid proprietary alternatives. These days very few people use proprietary version control systems, Git is simply superior to most proprietary options and you don't have to pay to use it.

When I started writing software the Git and Mercurial version control projects didn't exist. Both those projects had an enormous impact on the IT industry as they allowed for an entirely new paradigm of working on software, either open source or closed source. These tools were free and they allowed people to be a lot more productive when developing software. This added productivity for collaboratively working on code was enormously important for open source and the lack of any licensing hassles meant that Git increasingly became the standard choice for version control for open source projects.

As time went on more and more open source projects popped up. Another crucial event occurred in 2008 when GitHub opened. This platform combined the powerful Git version control system with a web based front end that made it much easier to work with Git. This enabled another big jump in software development productivity.

Around 10 years ago I was doing some work around warehouse management systems and ERP systems in a job I had in Canada. This firm offered a proprietary system for inventory management and many of their biggest clients were acquired in the 1990s. In the 1990s this proprietary option was probably a good option for many of their clients but 20 years later things had changed significantly. Far more options existed for people to run systems that were not only cheaper but had better business cases, the market for proprietary and open source software had already fundamentally changed the economics of these software offerings. Companies that already had clients on their systems had the advantage of expensive switching costs to keep their existing clients from churning. As anyone who's done an ERP implementation rollout will know, its not an easy process for many companies and as a result companies really hesitate to switch ERP systems unless they feel they have to. Fast forward a few years to 2019 and I was working with a warehousing and logistics consultant on a few projects. By 2019 that time there were a few open source warehouse management systems popping up and there multiple open source ERP systems with considerable features and mature support ecosystems around them. The main hesitation that businesses had for using an open source ERP in 2019 was a concern that it would cost them a lot of money in developer wages to implement their own systems. Since then a number of big things have changed that I think make open source ERP's a far more compelling option for businesses than even 5 years ago let alone 10:

• The ERP systems themselves have matured significantly, many code commits have been added to the main open source ERP projects in the last few years which have introduced new features and fixed bugs.
• Support ecosystems have now built up around many of the open source ERP platforms, this means that if you need to you can pay for some expert assistance.
• Deployment of ERP systems has become enormously easier thanks to developments in cloud computing platforms and dev-ops technologies. Now there's many very convenient things like pre-built docker images that can let you spin up an ERP and try it that same day. This was completely unthinkable a few decades ago.
• New developments in generative AI have the potential to greatly increase the productivity of senior software developers ^[1] which in turn makes it far more feasible to implement an open source ERP without needing a huge development team.
• The total cost of proprietary ownership of SAAS software has gone up significantly as SAAS sales teams have figured out how to capture much more of the profits that their systems generate. This means that even if a proprietary SAAS ERP system makes the company a significant amount of gross profits the licensing costs of the proprietary ERP system are likely to expand to take a slice of those profits. This can make this proprietary ERP software very expensive, and also as mentioned about switching costs are high so when you do reorganize your business around a new ERP system it will be costly to change that decision by moving to another ERP platform later.

Open source ERP

Given ERP systems are so important to modern businesses it comes as no surprise that software to service this need has been in active development for a long time. There's a number of proprietary systems in this area that have existed for multiple decades.

The following list are Open Source ERP options along with some details about them:

TinyERP/OpenERP (Defunct)

• License: GPLv3
• Written in: Python, JavaScript

TinyERP started as a project in 2005. A few years later this project was renamed to OpenERP.

I've included this project as an entry in this list because there's multiple high profile projects that were forked from this codebase.

Odoo - Community

• Website: https://www.odoo.com/
• License: Community version LGPLv3, "enterprise version" Proprietary license
• Written in: Python, JavaScript

in 2014 OpenERP was renamed to Odoo.

Odoo is strange in that it has a "community version" that is open source under the LGPL v3 license and an "enterprise version" that is proprietary. Most of the new feature work seems to be occurring in the enterprise edition which is not open source.

There does seem to be some confusion broadly speaking about the open source nature of Odoo's offerings. Most people who are getting sold Odoo as an option are being sold the enterprise version. For the most part these days when people are talking about Odoo they are usually referring to the proprietary version and not the community version.

Tryton

• Website: https://www.tryton.org
• License GPLv3
• Written in: Python, JavaScript

Tryton forked from TinyERP version 4.2 in 2008.

The first version of Tryton was published in November 2008.

ERPNext

• Website: https://erpnext.com/
• License: GPLv3
• Written in: Python, JavaScript
• Database: MariaDB

Dolibarr

• Website: https://www.dolibarr.org/
• License: GPLv3
• Written in: PHP
• Database: MariaDB, MySQL or PostgreSQL
• Source Code: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dolibarr/files/

Compiere (no longer open source)

• Website: http://www.compiere.com/
• License: GPL or Proprietary
• Written in: JavaEE
• Database: Oracle

First version was released in 1999. This project initially had a dependency on Oracle database and hence could never be stood up using a full open source stack. This may have changed later but the structure of the business developing Compiere has also changed to the point where the current situation is very different from that of 25 years ago.

In 2006 Compiere Inc raised capital from New Enterprise Associates with the goal of changing the business. Concerns over the direction of the project led to the ADempiere project starting via a fork in 2006. Later in 2010 Consona Corporation acquired Compiere and in 2022 Consona Corporation acquired Compiere Inc.

As time has gone on it seems most of the work on this platform has occurred in paid Enterprise plans that are not open source. So the offering here isn't really open source in the way it was at the inception of the project in 1999.

ADempiere

• Website: https://adempiere.io/
• License: GPLv2
• Written in: JavaEE
• Database: PostgreSQL or Oracle

Project started as a fork of the Compiere project in September 2006.

iDempiere

• Website: https://www.idempiere.org/
• License: GPLv2
• Written in: JavaEE
• Database: PostgreSQL or Oracle
• Source Code: https://github.com/idempiere/idempiere

Project starts in 2011 as a fork of the ADempiere project.

Metasfresh

• Website: http://metasfresh.com/en
• License: GPLv2, GPLv3
• Written in: Java, JavaScript
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Source code: https://github.com/metasfresh

MetasFresh is an actively maintained fork of ADempiere.

inoERP

• Website: http://www.inoideas.org/
• License: MPL-v2
• Written in: Go, Dart, Flutter, JavaScript
• Database: MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle 12c
• Source code: https://github.com/inoerp/inoERP

This project appears to not have any updates since this commit in June 28, 2023.

Apache OFBiz

• Website: https://ofbiz.apache.org/
• License: Apache License 2.0
• Written in: Java, JavaScript
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Source Code: https://github.com/apache/ofbiz-framework

Setup guide: https://gist.github.com/bagasme/1de1908c86303c83b7bd51d50a12e041