Today was the first day of the Openbravo Get Together meeting. A full day dedicated to how to do business with Openbravo. We were around 120 people during the morning and around 80 during the evening.

Here a summary and links of today's main sessions.

· The why and How of Open Source Participation.Matt Asay, General Manager, Americas. Full presentation (PDF format).

Matt started with a cool video merging images of FC Barcelona with Openbravo and commenting on the success of our project and community.

Matt's presentation has been focus on the dynamics of open source business and economics and which are the market trends, customer's options (based on polls) and successful strategies.

Here are some highlights of his talk:

- If the community does not do well, the company will not do well.
- When someone copies your software, the proprietary vision is that people are stealing your software. In free software world, the vision is that people is using your software.
- The focus has to be on writing exceptional open source software.
- A big problem for any software startup is to get people to use your software (dissemination) , something that open source solves very well.
- Proprietary software, you pay up front, the customer assumes all the risk. With open source, the customer buys services after has evaluated the product.
- The failure of "express" editions from IBM/Oracle against open source database (you can not fool people).
- In all open source projects, 85% of development is done by less than 15 developers.
- GPL is the most suitable license for business.
- Forking happens when you fail to take care of your community (Compiere/Adempiere, Joomla/Mambo)
- 10 open source vendors will do over $10m in 2007.

· Openbravo in the world of ERP. Manel Sarasa, Openbravo's CEO. Full presentation (PDF format).

- Introduction to open source and Openbravo community.
- Analysis of the cost structure of Open source vs. proprietary companies.
- Expending on software for SME (licenses: SME 27%, support: 36%, maintenance: 37%). Source ODC. 2004
- ERP adoption is SME is still low. Licenses costs are a hug burden for small firms.
- Use the 30% of license cost to adapt your software to your needs.
- Openbravo vision: All companies, regardless of their size, need a management system adapted to their needs.
- Mission: aims to offer the best possible management system and the tools needed for successful development and implementation.

· Session: Success Stories. Eugeni Vives, Openbravo's Chief Consulting Officer. Full presentation (PDF format).

- 2001 started with the first live customer.
- Openbravo customer profile: €2 - 50M millions revenue, ten to several hundreds employees. Currently focusing on the SME (SoHo discarted).
- Industries: manufacturing, distribution & logistics, engineering, professional services, media & publishing, construction.
- Estimate d 90 live installations lead by Openbravo or its partners. 89% customers in Europe (80% Spain), 7% LATAM and rest from others. Many others from community that we cannot count.
- Alimarket publications (100 employees, revenues ~10m): first know live implementation with PostgreSQL.
- First verticals in construction and publishing industries.
- Next industries: public administration (Centatic), City Hall (City Hall of Amorebieta), Telecom industry (Poland).

· Session: Common Customer View Project (Open Solutions Alliance project). Josep Mitjà, Openbravo's COO and Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo. Full presentation (PDF format).

- Mission of the Open Solutions Alliance is to expand the market for business open source solutions.
- Areas of work: customer adoption, interoperability, explain benefits of open solutions, community engagement
- Founded by ISVs.
- Customer view project focus: interoperability on single sign on and data synchronization.
- Companies involved: Openbravo, CentricCRM, Adaptive Planning, JasperSoft, SpikeSource, Unisys
- Single sign-on thanks too LAM and based on CAS.

· Session: LibrePos and Openbravo in the retail market. Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo and LibrePos author. Full presentation (PDF format). Full presentation (PDF format).

- LibrePos is a point of sale application designed for touch screens with support for receipt printers, customer displays, barcode scanners, scales, etc
- Localized into English, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician.
- It written in Java, using Swing and it runs in any operating system that supports Java (Linux, Windows, etc).
- Openbravo has acquired LibrePos and will backup LibrePos development, allowing it to grow up quickly. LibrePOS supports synchronization with Openbravo ERP.
- Started on January 2005. Near 100.000 accumulated downloads since then. It has been in the #17 position at SourceForge ranking.
- There are installations of LibrePos in Spain, USA, Chine, Kenya, Netherlands, Canada, Honduras, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Romania, Italy, Portugal, among others.
- Future development: customer module (loyalty module, discounts), employees module (shift management), Restaurant module (kitchen printers, handhelds).

Tomorrow we will continue the Openbravo Get Together meeting with the technology day.

Related blog posts

• Openbravo Get Together - Blogging After the First Session
• Running the open-source bulls with Openbravo

Note: After the Openbravo Get Together finishes we will publish all the presentations in the main openbravo.com site.

Today was the first day of the Openbravo Get Together meeting. A full day dedicated to how to do business with Openbravo. We were around 120 people during the morning and around 80 during the evening.

Here a summary and links of today's main sessions.

· The why and How of Open Source Participation.Matt Asay, General Manager, Americas. Full presentation (PDF format).

Matt started with a cool video merging images of FC Barcelona with Openbravo and commenting on the success of our project and community.

Matt's presentation has been focus on the dynamics of open source business and economics and which are the market trends, customer's options (based on polls) and successful strategies.

Here are some highlights of his talk:

- If the community does not do well, the company will not do well.
- When someone copies your software, the proprietary vision is that people are stealing your software. In free software world, the vision is that people is using your software.
- The focus has to be on writing exceptional open source software.
- A big problem for any software startup is to get people to use your software (dissemination) , something that open source solves very well.
- Proprietary software, you pay up front, the customer assumes all the risk. With open source, the customer buys services after has evaluated the product.
- The failure of "express" editions from IBM/Oracle against open source database (you can not fool people).
- In all open source projects, 85% of development is done by less than 15 developers.
- GPL is the most suitable license for business.
- Forking happens when you fail to take care of your community (Compiere/Adempiere, Joomla/Mambo)
- 10 open source vendors will do over $10m in 2007.

· Openbravo in the world of ERP. Manel Sarasa, Openbravo's CEO.

- Introduction to open source and Openbravo community.
- Analysis of the cost structure of Open source vs. proprietary companies.
- Expending on software for SME (licenses: SME 27%, support: 36%, maintenance: 37%). Source ODC. 2004
- ERP adoption is SME is still low. Licenses costs are a hug burden for small firms.
- Use the 30% of license cost to adapt your software to your needs.
- Openbravo vision: All companies, regardless of their size, need a management system adapted to their needs.
- Mission: aims to offer the best possible management system and the tools needed for successful development and implementation.

· Session: Success Stories. Eugeni Vives, Openbravo's Chief Consulting Officer.

- 2001 started with the first live customer.
- Openbravo customer profile: 50 millions revenue, several hundreds employees. Currently Focusing on the SME (SoHo discarted).
- Industries: manufacturing, distribution & logistics, engineering, professional services, media & publishing, construction.
- Estimate d 90 live installations lead by Openbravo or its partners. 89% customers in Europe (80% Spain), 7% LATAM and rest from others. Many others from community that we cannot count.
- Alimarket publications (100 employees, revenues ~10m): first know live implementation with PostgreSQL.
- First verticals in construction and publishing industries.
- Next industries: public administration (Centatic), City Hall (City Hall of Amorebieta), Telecom industry (Poland).

· Session: Common Customer View Project (Open Solutions Alliance project). Josep Mitjà, Openbravo's COO and Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo.
- Mission of the Open Solutions Alliance is to expand the market for business open source solutions.
- Areas of work: customer adoption, interoperability, explain benefits of open solutions, community engagement
- Founded by ISVs.
- Customer view project focus: interoperability on single sign on and data synchronization.
- Companies involved: Openbravo, CentricCRM, Adaptive Planning, JasperSoft, SpikeSource, Unisys
- Single sign-on thanks too LAM and based on CAS.

· Session: LibrePos and Openbravo in the retail market. Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo and LibrePos author. Full presentation (PDF format).

- LibrePos is a point of sale application designed for touch screens with support for receipt printers, customer displays, barcode scanners, scales, etc
- Localized into English, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician.
- It written in Java, using Swing and it runs in any operating system that supports Java (Linux, Windows, etc).
- Openbravo has acquired LibrePos and will backup LibrePos development, allowing it to grow up quickly. LibrePOS supports synchronization with Openbravo ERP.
- Started on January 2005. Near 100.000 accumulated downloads since then. It has been in the #17 position at SourceForge ranking.
- There are installations of LibrePos in Spain, USA, Chine, Kenya, Netherlands, Canada, Honduras, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Romania, Italy, Portugal, among others.
- Future development: customer module (loyalty module, discounts), employees module (shift management), Restaurant module (kitchen printers, handhelds).

Tomorrow we will continue the Openbravo Get Together meeting with the technology day.

Related blog posts

• Openbravo Get Together - Blogging After the First Session
• Running the open-source bulls with Openbravo

Note: After the Openbravo Get Together finishes we will publish all the presentations in the main openbravo.com site.

Once in a while you like to look backward and to see your evolution. I have always been a big fan of metrics because they help you take better decisions and see how your efforts impact in your evolution. Today I decided to blog a bit about Openbravo community evolution for the last 10 months.

Looking after the community services at most of the companies also means investing lots of time on helping your company to setup processes and methodologies that are open source friendly. One of the few people that I know doing this job is Quim Gil, that is also Catalan (the other few people that know are around the Open Solutions Alliance). During a dinner in Helsinki a few days back he mentioned that working inside doors was also taking an important part of his time. Same for me. Well, this kind of work I think that is very important and has a big impact on your success.

Let's see the statistics.

Downloads
A download is the starting point for a person
that at some stage may become user or developer of your application and
it is one of the best indicators to measure dissemination. We went from
20.000 downloads per month to 31.250 (average of the last three
months).

Wiki
We setup Openbravo Wiki at the beginning of February 2007. At the time we had little documentation and it was in PDF format. We moved all the documents to the Wiki and started to create new documents directly in the Wiki. It has been a complete success in terms of pageviews, unique users (15% increase per month) and collaboration. Many people every week fixes, creates and translates documents. There are still many things to document in a system as complex as an ERP but we will get there.

Forums
The forums are the main communication off-line tool (we use IRC for real-time) for Openbravo users and developers. We have forums for different subjects ranging from development to help. You can clearly notice how our Spanish speaking community is around 50% of our forum traffic. In January 2007 we had 350 messages per month. Last month we had more 872 (see the All graphic). From those, 30% where from Openbravo employees assisting other users. We had 157 users participating.

Quality Assurance
Our community has been quite active in helping on Quality Assurance. We recently have created the Acceptance Test and other tools to help us to increase it. As you can see in the graphic the number of bugs reported and fixed are correlated to our release cycle. Last month, we had 175 bugs reported and 123 fixed. Since the start of the project we had 2056 bugs submitted from 117 different reporters, 24% of the reports were from Openbravo employees. We have some really active community members in terms of bug reporting.

Localizations
In January 2007 we had 12 localization efforts registered and 3 completed (two by Openbravo). Today we have 41 projects registered, 6 released and 16 that have produced already some kind of deliverable. The localization of a system like and ERP requires a person with accounting skills (accounting plan, taxes for every country) and also translation. It is a hard work and our community deserves all the merits.

Finally, last month we were selected SourceForge Project of the month (that personally make me very happy). We actually have been in the top 10 position (today we are at fourth) of the SourceForge ranking for a few months.

Note: All the data (except Wiki traffic) is available to everyone at SourceForge.

Once in a while you like to look backward and to see your evolution. I have always been a big fan of metrics because they help you take better decisions and see how your efforts impact in your evolution. Today I decided to blog a bit about Openbravo community evolution for the last 10 months.

Looking after the community services at most of the companies also means investing lots of time on helping your company to setup processes and methodologies that are open source friendly. One of the few people that I know doing this job is Quim Gil, that is also Catalan (the other few people that know are around the Open Solutions Alliance). During a dinner in Helsinki a few days back he mentioned that working inside doors was also taking an important part of his time. Same for me. Well, this kind of work I think that is very important and has a big impact on your success.

Let's see the statistics.

Downloads
A download is the starting point for a person
that at some stage may become user or developer of your application and
it is one of the best indicators to measure dissemination. We went from
20.000 downloads per month to 31.250 (average of the last three
months).

Wiki
We setup Openbravo Wiki at the beginning of February 2007. At the time we had little documentation and it was in PDF format. We moved all the documents to the Wiki and started to create new documents directly in the Wiki. It has been a complete success in terms of pageviews, unique users (15% increase per month) and collaboration. Many people every week fixes, creates and translates documents. There are still many things to document in a system as complex as an ERP but we will get there.

Forums
The forums are the main communication off-line tool (we use IRC for real-time) for Openbravo users and developers. We have forums for different subjects ranging from development to help. You can clearly notice how our Spanish speaking community is around 50% of our forum traffic. In January 2007 we had 350 messages per month. Last month we had more 872 (see the All graphic). From those, 30% where from Openbravo employees assisting other users. We had 157 users participating.

Quality Assurance
Our community has been quite active in helping on Quality Assurance. We recently have created the Acceptance Test and other tools to help us to increase it. As you can see in the graphic the number of bugs reported and fixed are correlated to our release cycle. Last month, we had 175 bugs reported and 123 fixed. Since the start of the project we had 2056 bugs submitted from 117 different reporters, 24% of the reports were from Openbravo employees. We have some really active community members in terms of bug reporting.

Localizations
In January 2007 we had 12 localization efforts registered and 3 completed (two by Openbravo). Today we have 41 projects registered, 6 released and 16 that have produced already some kind of deliverable. The localization of a system like and ERP requires a person with accounting skills (accounting plan, taxes for every country) and also translation. It is a hard work and our community deserves all the merits.

Finally, last month we were selected SourceForge Project of the month (that personally make me very happy). We actually have been in the top 10 position (today we are at fourth) of the SourceForge ranking for a few months.

Note: All the data (except Wiki traffic) is available to everyone at SourceForge.

There is no doubt that Openbravo's community is growing very fast. The strength of the product -which has been in production since 2001-, and a truly open company vision, which places the community at the core of everything we do (from development and testing to documentation) is no doubt helping.

Born on April 19th, 2006 (the date when Openbravo's code was first was published in SourceForge) the following indicators clearly show Openbravo's community has enjoyed a remarkable activity:

• More than 350,000 accumulated downloads (today we have more than 1,000 average downloads a day)
• 1,400 bugs reported
• 41 registered localization projects
• 7,500 messages in 11 forums, with
• 172 individuals participating every month (17 are Openbravo employees)
• 67 registered developers in SourceForge.net (31 are Openbravo employees)
• 933 registered in the wiki (30 are Openbravo employees)

Right now I am getting the final confirmed attendants in our first international community gathering in Barcelona: the so called Openbravo Get Together and they look great! We have confirmed the attendance of almost 200 participants coming from 31 different countries representing all continents.

We will cover several topics, including business and technical aspects. We also will show case one of the first tangible results of the Open Solutions Alliance: the Common Customer View project's single sign-on.

For all of you attending ... THANK YOU and a WARM WELCOME TO BARCELONA! I don't have any doubts that you will enjoy the event and will help bring Openbravo's community one step forward.

For those that you can not attend, don't be sad: we will post the different presentations and summaries of the different sessions.

This is only the beginning!

There is no doubt that Openbravo's community is growing very fast. The strength of the product -which has been in production since 2001-, and a truly open company vision, which places the community at the core of everything we do (from development and testing to documentation) is no doubt helping.

Born on April 19th, 2006 (the date when Openbravo's code was first was published in SourceForge) the following indicators clearly show Openbravo's community has enjoyed a remarkable activity:

• More than 350,000 accumulated downloads (today we have more than 1,000 average downloads a day)
• 1,400 bugs reported
• 41 registered localization projects
• 7,500 messages in 11 forums, with
• 172 individuals participating every month (17 are Openbravo employees)
• 67 registered developers in SourceForge.net (31 are Openbravo employees)
• 933 registered in the wiki (30 are Openbravo employees)

Right now I am getting the final confirmed attendants in our first international community gathering in Barcelona: the so called Openbravo Get Together and they look great! We have confirmed the attendance of almost 200 participants coming from 31 different countries representing all continents.

We will cover several topics, including business and technical aspects. We also will show case one of the first tangible results of the Open Solutions Alliance: the Common Customer View project's single sign-on.

For all of you attending ... THANK YOU and a WARM WELCOME TO BARCELONA! I don't have any doubts that you will enjoy the event and will help bring Openbravo's community one step forward.

For those that you can not attend, don't be sad: we will post the different presentations and summaries of the different sessions.

This is only the beginning!

So in the end, what will Round 2 LinuxWorld be remembered for? In addition to meeting some great representatives from companies in the Open Solutions Alliance, and talking to potential partners and end clients; quite simply I’ll remember LinuxWorld itself for three simple reasons:

1. Winning the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Award: Openbravo won the award for Best Integrated Solution! Winners in other categories included Hyperic and Enterprise DB.
2. Our product works with the Iphone? Well apparently yes! We were with an Iphone user and completed basic processes, looked at reports, etc. While it hasn’t been fully tested by our QA department, our 15 minute tryout showed that Openbravo worked with the standard web browser!
3. Signing up participants for our Miami Trainings: Basic Functional, Customization and Basic Development, and Advanced Development Training. For more information, please visit: Openbravo Scheduled Training.

However while giving demos, talking about the product, and meeting people was great; outside of the conference itself the most reflective viewpoint came in gauging where we were, are, and will be going.

Looking back to one year ago, I recall a 20 person company which was Openbravo for only 8 months and still defining an identity and structure; a product which had room for improvement in both usability and functionality; and a training department which was simply a good idea, but far from a reality.

What we have now is a 50+ person company (I took vacation last week and 2 new people were here today), almost 2 years old. We have a product with a new interface, new integrated functionalities, and with a JasperSoft tool making it much easier to advance product reporting. And finally, we our training boasts an online demo, elearning module, and live training sessions which have been in South America, United States, Europe, and Asia.

As for where we are going? The natural answer is simple: wait and see.

This week Fernando Iriazabal (Openbravo developer), Ismael Ciordia (Openbravo CTO) and Jordi Mas (me) will be travelling to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (23 of July - 27 of July) in Portland, Oregon. We will be joining the 2500 participants that are attending this year. During the first two days we will be in Open Solutions Alliance stand (participating in their interoperability hack-a-thon) in the exhibitors area with other Openbravo folks and OSA members and from Wednesday we will be attending the sessions and meeting other open source companies and people.

If you want to meet us just come to the OSA stand in the OSCON exhibitor area and ask for any us. We will see you there!

This week Fernando Iriazabal (Openbravo developer), Ismael Ciordia (Openbravo CTO) and Jordi Mas (me) will be travelling to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (23 of July - 27 of July) in Portland, Oregon. We will be joining the 2500 assistants that are attending this year. During the first two days we will be in Open Solutions Alliance stand (participating in their interoperability hack-a-thon) in the exhibitors area with other Openbravo folks and OSA members and from Wednesday we will be attending the sessions and meeting other open source companies and people.

If you want to meet us just come to the OSA stand in the OSCON exhibitor area and ask for any us. We will see you there!

On June 7th Stephen Walli invited me through his blog to list three success factors and three things to avoid when building businesses using open source software. This is coming from a challenge initiated by Mikko Puhakka that tagged three people to jump in (one of them was Stephen) and there is already a good number of opinions being posted through this interesting pyramid (e.g, Marten Mickos, Javier Soltero, …). So here I go:
Continue reading "Manel Sarasa: 3 success factors, 3 things to avoid when building an OSS business"

Dear friends,
This last year at Openbravo has been an extremely exciting and at the same time a very encouraging experience.
It seems like only yesterday that we were releasing our code on SourceForge and hoping that there would be a receptive audience of people interested in helping us to build the world’s best open source ERP solution. Just one year later, the sheer volume of interest, support and success we’ve enjoyed has been amazing.
After publishing our source code in April 2006, Openbravo rapidly became one of the key open source ERP reference solutions, with consistent top rankings in every major metric of activity compared to all other software projects published on SourceForge. Since Openbravo passed the 100,000 downloads mark on New Year’s Eve 2006, download rates have continued to grow. We are now opening our second office, in Barcelona and have continued to expand our team with excellent professionals experienced in handling the growing international demand and opportunities that exist for Openbravo.
In September 2006 we officially launched our Partner Support Unit by unveiling our Friendly Partner Program. Distinguishing Openbravo from other start-ups in the space, this program allowed us to build a network of 20 partners with whom we have been expanding our services while fine tuning support processes and acquiring further partners to help scale up our offering. The confidence that Openbravo gained through working with our first partners and the constant help and feedback we received was crucial in guiding the design of our latest program and we very much appreciate every effort and continued support.
In April 2007, having successfully closed our initial friendly partner phase, we launched an unprecedented, breakthrough Partner Program. This new program, which I invite you all to review, incorporates some extremely innovative services that contribute in creating a secure and powerful network of international partners. Today, thanks to this program, we are able to attract best-in-class partners from all over the world. They rely on our expertise to extend our successes to a large array of end customers of all different sizes and from a variety of sectors.
These successes have not gone unnoticed. We’ve been discussed in magazines such as Fortune, CIO Magazine, and Enterprise Open Source Magazine. We were also invited to join the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) as a founding member alongside companies we very much respect, including JasperSoft, CentricCRM, Talend, SpikeSource and Hyperic. We are extremely positive about the work being developed there to foster interoperability among different open solutions, and proud that our COO Josep Mitjà has now been invited to act as OSA Board Member. Other leading open source gurus and companies have also helped us in our plans, and it would be unfair not to mention the help we have received from them (you know who you are ). Thank you so much!
We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some fantastic developers and be assisted by a wonderful group of employees and friends. The success of the Openbravo project on SourceForge has been built upon through the creation of the Openbravo Wiki, while the demand to use and develop Openbravo worldwide has led to localisation projects for over 20 different countries. As requests have come in for features like PostgreSQL support and a web services interface, the incredible talents of the developers and supporters of Openbravo have continued to meet and exceed our goals.
While we are proud of our successes, we’re even more excited about the future. Forthcoming developments including a thrilling new web interface, revised focused ERP functionalities and interfaces to the other leading open source projects are being created right now and will be released over the next few months. In addition we are working on the next generation platform architecture of Openbravo, code-named Openbravo Green. You can see our progress and goals for Openbravo Green on our publicly-available roadmap. Making our roadmap public is just one of the ways that we aim to show how transparent and shared our vision is. We truly believe in open source development, and that a web-based open source ERP solution can not only match the proprietary solutions available, but surpass them and create a solution that redefines ERP software in the process. The only way to make our goals happen is through the continued hard work of many, many people. For those who have helped us with that hard work and invested their trust, time and effort in us, please accept our sincerest thanks.
For those of you now joining our broad community, we wish you a warm welcome and thank you for joining and opening ERP’s future!

Openbravo started under the name of Tecnicia S.L back in 2001. At the time, the company was looking for an open-source web-based ERP for its customers. Since no suitable solution was found, we started to build our own solution based on another ERP called Compiere, that was available only as a Java client at the time.

From 2003 and until 2006 five people worked full time on the project (the team grew to 11 people by that time) developing new functionality for customers of different business sectors. During the that time the source code was delivered to our customers.

At the beginning of 2006, Openbravo secured an investment of 5 million Euros with the public venture capital fund Sodena. The objective was to build the best open source web based ERP and become an international player.

On April 18th 2006 Openbravo announced the release of Openbravo ERP R2.0 and published the source code at SourceForge. We started opening our development process using the bug tracking, source control and public forums at SourceForge to carry out our development.

During the first three months of public live of Openbravo one of the most recurrent requests that we received was to add support for PostgreSQL database engine. After a few months of work and as an answer to our community requests we released a new version of Openbravo with support for PostgreSQL database.

On September 2006, just five months after publishing the project at SourceForge, the project was ranked project number 6 in SourceForge ranking. That month, Openbravo ERP had 18.128 downloads and 420 messages in its forums, showing the growing interest for Openbravo.

Since the beginning we believed that all the documentation of our project had to be libre and free. The initial documentation was published in SourceForge but after a few months we launched the Openbravo Wiki that helped to vertebrate the collaboration efforts around of our project. Also, helped to vertebrate the localization of this documents to other languages like Spanish and Chinese.

We kept working on opening our development making our roadmap publically available, letting people to prioritize it, setting up a IRC channel to ease the communication between community members, setting up our own Planet and publishing for discussing Openbravo Green, our next platform generation.

On St. Valentine's Day of this year, the Open Solutions Alliance was presented. Openbravo is a founder member and it has been working since its conception in establishing synergies with other projects and open communities.

Last April, one year after of our debut in SourceForge, the statistics for that month were respectable: 72 bugs opened (44 closed), 488 messages in our forums, 22.775 downloads (6.681 product downloads), 21 registered localizations of which four projects are completed.

What are the challenges for next year? Keep building the participation and communication channels and the necessary infrastructure to encourage the steady growth of our community.

Let's make it happen!

Many often I read in the big new sites how open source is changing the game for the big
industry players. However, it is also changing the game for small
players, those that mainly build the local economies in many countries.



Only Spain there are about 1.000 ERP alike business solutions. Most of
them are for SME, proprietary software and focused on specific business
sectors. The situation is, as far as I know, very similar for many
European countries. Dozens of small IT companies developed their
business applications that usually sell to a reduced number of local
costumers that rank from DVD renting shops to hardware stores.



But this reality has been changing in the last few years. Microsoft Dynamics (Axapta) is
taking the space of many of these applications and small IT vendors.
Microsoft also has local joint ventures, they have on in Lleida for
example, that
work building vertical solutions.

They are even getting in narrow market niches.

All the markets that mature trend to concentration, and
in a few years, there are only going to be a few players left. Sage Group, a
large proprietary software vendor, has been joining forces with other
proprietary vendors in the last few years. And SAP (that bought Factory
Logic) has already spent a billion dollars trying to set up a business
SaaS solution focused for SME. Too many big guys looking at a very
fragmented marked. Someone is going to get hurt.



ERP industry has been little innovative in the recent years. Open
source, that empowers users and developers, may change this letting
people from local companies, that know their local business environment very
well, leverage their previous experience and innovate with new features and use cases.

What is the future for the small IT companies used to build and sell
their home grow solutions? They have two options. Choose the blue pill
and become a Microsoft or other proprietary partner or take the red
pill and embrace an open solution. Taking the red pill you are going
to be able to build your own vertical solutions in the already existant
open source business stack of applications, be open standards, be cost
effective (licenses are 30% of the cost of ERP proprietary solutions),
choose which technologies you want to work with, and more important,
have access to the knowledge (in form of source code and other
resources) that allows you excel in selling your open source business
solutions.



More than 50 companies around the world are already trusting Openbravo
to install and deploy ERP based on open source solutions and the number
keeps growing every month. Do not let your platform limit your
freedom and possibilities.



Tags: OSA, Openbravo

Last week, while still in Cannes, I read an article about SAP’s point of view on the impact of open source in ERPs. Henning Kagermann, SAP’s current CEO, declared in Computer Business Review that “Open Source is an option for operating systems and databases but not at the business application level”. This point of view does not surprise me since it is not a new statement coming from a top software executive. In the past, important executives such as Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer also disregarded the Open Source opportunity/ threat in the operating system world. But … you know … what really strikes me is the main rationale that Henning was using to support his point of view. He argumented that Open Source successful projects are those where developers like to work for “fun” and literally said “I have never seen anyone who likes doing that (referring to altering applications to cater for legal or regulatory changes such as Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel II). That is not fun. There is no choice. The boring bits are a strength of SAP” .
I am really astonished … Can we imply that SAP’s strengths against open source competitors are only built upon boring pieces?. Does Henning see open source competitors failing on their purpose because there is no fun on building ERPs?. If that was the name of the game … and you are working at SAP … please tell your boss that our growing community encompassing now more than 50 employees and more than hundreds of individuals working for IT companies around the world is really having “fun”!!!!. But please tell him that we are not having fun for the sake of fun. And here it comes the true reason why open source will make it in the world of ERPs: Fun for the sake of building Openbravo, the leading open source ERP Company in the space. At the end experience tells us that everything that can be built on open source, is finally built on open source (see other similar projects that are building business applications successfully with open source @ the Open Solutions Alliance )".

Anyway … I am convinced that we will see Henning in the future adapting its pitch as many others (read Gates and Ballmer) have done it. Don’t you think?

These days I have been reading with interest a few blog posts about communities and open source and commeting this with some OSA members. Also I have been lately following a large amount of companies (from Alfresco to MySQL) producing or building their solutions on open source.

I think that, for a software producer, open source means three things:

• A license that guarantees a set of rights and obligations for the users.
• A business model.
• An open and collaborative way of developing software.

There is lot of said about the first two points. I would like to concentrate in the last point.

A vibrant community can add lots of value to a product: it decreases the entrance curve because the amount of documentation and support available, it can be localized to languages that you never heard before, you get reference implementations, and most important, you get different people working and investing on your product.

But communities are not exclusive to open source. Many proprietary products have large communities around them that produce add-ons, localizations, documentation and give free support. Some also use the Internet for distributing feature-limited versions of their software.

Many companies just see open source as a model of getting a wide dissemination of their software with little investment having no real interest in open up their development. Some even have an open source version of their software and then a professional or commercial version with additional closed source features. I strongly believe that they are missing an important part of the picture.

For me, true open source communities are the ones where roadmap, architectural, and development decisions are carried following an open and collaborative approach.

This is a short list of questions that I think help to identify how community-driven is the development backed by a company.

Product

• Is the product roadmap pubically available?
• Is there any way for your community to prioritize the roadmap?
• Are requests for new functionality handled in a open and transparent way?
• Is your product well documented? Are you providing infrastructures like wikis to make it happen?
• Are your employees the only ones representing the product in conferences?
  

Development

• Do developers from outside your company have privileges to make changes on the code base based on their knowledge? (meritocracy) Or are they second class citizens?
• Are the architectural decisions shared with the community?
  
• Is your development carried in open mailing lists and chat channels? Does your development team live in the community? Or completely apart?
  

Engineering

• Is there a public database of all know bugs? Or you still keep an internal database?
• Do people document their changes using ChangeLogs and similar ways?
• Are software releases done regularly to encourage participation?
  

I think that these are just some of the many questions that can be asked. Some new open source companies come from a proprietary background and those issues clearly represent important challenges that imply changing processes and behaviors but also represent new opportunities.

What you think? I will love hearing from you.

Update: More comments from Matt Asay at Infoworld and Savio Rodrigues.