2009 the year for open-source ERP?
While open source has made its mark in just about every product segment within enterprise software, ERP (enterprise resource planning) has remained firmly proprietary. As CIO.com's Thomas Wailgum suggests, however, the time may be ripe for change.
The reason? Years of empty promises and overloaded invoices from the incumbent ERP vendors may finally ring hollow in a global recession:
Does a massive, 18-month, multimillion-dollar ERP rollout, with the odds of implementation and user acceptance stacked against you and 22 percent annual maintenance costs to boot, seem appropriate now?
ERP industry guru Vinnie Mirchandani likes to say that there are too many "empty calories" in ERP spend, especially in SAP and Oracle maintenance fees. Now is clearly not the time to be ordering up large portions of highly caloric ERP software rollouts.
Just as the economy is proving to be Google's toughest competitor and the biggest reason to innovate, so, too, may the economy be chief information officers' biggest reason to get out of the "no one ever got fired for spending way too much on bloated ERP" mindset and shift spending to software as a service and open-source ERP.
Openbravo, Compiere, and other open-source solutions have been around for several years, and they are surprisingly robust and feature-rich. 2009, with all its financial challenges, may well be the opportune time for CIOs to kick the tires on these alternative solutions.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to Openbravo, an open-source ERP vendor.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
You still using that paper by your pseudo-academic lawyer as your bible?
I would hate for you to have to do some real thinking.
It is time for you to put up, show me one instance in a widely used or even moderately used OSS app that have "criminal hackers who put illegal code into open source applications". Just one. I guarantee you that MS has way more "illegal" code in their software then say RedHat.
The open source legal foundation that defended and lost the BTNET cases also suggests that this outcome has large implications for future open source development. Penguin, you have had your head in the sand if you have not seen countless examples of open source developers either on this very blog site or in development forums talking about how they either want to, or could, or are actually in the process of reverse engineering a proprietary software program and breaking encryption in the process. I realize that now all reverse engineering is illegal, but after this BTNET case, if it involves the breaking of encryption then it certainly could be interpreted as criminal in the US courts.
I can't give you the name of our product, but threats to break into our entrypted trade secrets have also been posted by open source developers on the internet. My guess is that anyone who sells a proprietary software program now has these kinds of rogue open source developers on their radar screen.
It is time for you to put up my friend. If you are honestly saying that the open source community is policing this activity as you were the other day, then please show me one example of a GPL legal foundation where this is happening. The GPL legal foundations that I know about just defend these rogue criminals when they go to trial.
The people who wrote that could have put it under a proprietary license and the outcome would be the same. What they did had nothing to do with the GPL or OSS. Not a single thing.
That is a bogus example for many reasons, especially since it is not a widely used application.
Nice try.
The FSF or EFF are liable to slap you with a libel suit if you don't stop with the unfounded accusations. You think that there is an army of real OSS programmers assaulting your precious secrets(I guarantee none of it really a secret anyway) so it can be included in whatever they are writing?
Are you serious?
I bet $1000 to a donut that those "attacks" are merely ping scans that every node that faces the internet gets 100's of times a day. Speaking of, how incompetent is your company to store information on a publicly facing machine that you don't want others to know. Incompetence or stupidity, you decide.
You are seriously in need of some critical thought and some medication to help with your paranoia.
From your postings, you can't be more then a janitor in this company, because you have no clue what you are talking about. When your magical "encrypted" program sees the light of day, any end-user can write a program that does everything your does WITHOUT reverse engineering. By simply using it.
I gave you an example of Cease and Desist. Obviously, after a Cease and Desist, the program will not be used. This is exactly what happened with the open source product that threatened Vivdeni Games. Now it is your turn. Let's see evidence of an open source legal foundation that is actually going after these kinds of rogues, rather than defending them.
My statement should have read "I realize that not all reverse engineering is illegal ...." above. It was a mistype.
I don't disagree that reverse engineering probably happens on the proprietary side as well, but companies like SAP and Oracle aren't likely to get shut down by cease and desist order like this, and they are also very unlikely to be comitting this type of crime in the first place. You have to remember who the largest innovators in the ERP space are, and it certainly isn't any Open Source company - the likes of OpenBravo and Compiere have barely caught up to Quickbooks in terms of functionality and accounting capability - let alone even playing in the same ball field as MS Dynamics, Oracle, or SAP.
As much as Matt wants you to think CIOs are all stupid, most large businesses don't pay the exorbitant fees to these behemoths because they are somehow "hoodwinked" by them. You get what you pay for.
The case involving Vivendi Games did involve specifically a Cease and Desist order. Cease and Desist is a very powerful legal weapon and to pentest's point - that is why this open source product is not widely used. Would you expect it to be widely used after a Cease and Desist order?
That program could have easily used a proprietary license, or a freeware(different than OSS), or shareware. If it had, would proprietary programs be at risk? What about shareware?
Once again, the license has NOTHING to do with the lawsuit. It is irrelevant.
So if 1 gun owner commits murder, then all gun owners are at risk with getting charged with murder? That is exactly what you are implying here.
[CNET editors' note: Prohibited content deleted.]
I am still waiting for you to tell me the name of an open source foundation that is going after these kinds of rogues ........
The BTNET software had all the features of computer games that were worth $1 billion dollar a year in revenues and the net worth of the user base would easily match that of MySQL if not for the Cease and Desist order. Remember that MySQL sold to Sun for $1 billion.
Unless the open source community stops this kind of activity, you will definitely see more Cease and Desist orders and they will also be on very big targets like BTNET.
I hereby nominate you for Internet Moron of the Year and Worst Troll.
What does the mysql sale have to do with anything?
Pray, tell me how the "OSS community" could have stopped BTNET.
Moron
By the way, MSSlayer as I recall you have also made statements that would be probably be illegal if you acted upon them about breaking into encryptions that protect proprietary software and trade secrets. Your statements are actually a very good example of why I would not trust open source software developed under the GPL license for any enterprise project. Do we have examples of Microsoft developers making these kinds of statements? I know of none. On the other hand, these kinds of statements by GPL developers are all over the internet. GPL developers like you who make these malicious statements about breaking encrytpions in proprietary software have tremendously helped the sale of proprietary software I just show my customers these kinds of statements and the effect is that they do not trust open source GPL developments either.
Thank you very much for your assistance to our sales efforts.
So what do we have now? BTNET has nothing to do with OSS, and would have got sued and lost, regardless of what license they used. The EFF helped them defend themselves, but they have nothing to do with the GPL. Yet, you in your idiocy are finding commonalities between these disjoint sets and lumping in the millions of honest OSS developers? Really? That is the best you have?
Guilt by association is a fallacy for good reason.
You can't even spell encryption. It is not hard to break encryption when the software has to come with the encryption key. It could not be executed without decrypting it, meaning, encryption in this area is pointless. Unless of course you think an encrypted executable can be processed without it, which wouldn't surprise me.
Good thing that most CIO's and others that are in charge of enterprise software acquisition aren't retarded like you are. Your customers are morons as well for listening to your lies and fearmongering.
You are not Homer Simpson stupid, you are Beavis and Butthead stupid.
For example, daftkey claims "the likes of OpenBravo and Compiere have barely caught up to Quickbooks in terms of functionality and accounting capability - let alone even playing in the same ball field as MS Dynamics, Oracle, or SAP."
Oh really!
Then companies such as Openbravo must be really good with smoke and mirrors since it has 1,000 paying ERP customers across distribution, engineering, manufacturing, media & publishing, services, public administration, and retail.
Ref: http://www.openbravo.com/customers/
The traditional proprietary software model is a sinking ship. Those who are smart get off a sinking ship.
Intuit can (and does) claim the same thing with Quickbooks, and enjoys a pretty huge lead in the overall market for accounting systems. That doesn't necesarrily mean that you could go and install Quickbooks at, say, Honeywell (they are in most of the industries you list) and expect to get the accounting process or reporting functionality that they would need. In fact, I would say most people with even a very BASIC knowledge of accounting would know that there's a pretty big difference, functionally, between Quickbooks and SAP.
I would assume that the URL you mention points to some of the highest profile customers using OpenBravo - that's a pretty interesting link. I found Galenicum's quote most amusing: "The most important decision factor was that it is easier to customize Openbravo than the other two options. SAP and [Microsoft] Dynamics are much more rigid in what they can do."
Not that this quote is funny by itself, but that it was made by the partner of a company with only 9 Million euros of annual revenue and 12 employees. Either the company is very VERY optimistic about future growth opportunities that they would think taking the time and cost to even explore SAP or Dynamics would be worthwhile, or the partner is just an idiot that likes to waste money exploring ERP options designed for companies with a hundred times the revenue and a thousand times the headcount of his corporation.
Judging by that link, I would say that most of the companies listed would be served quite well with Quickbooks or Simply Accounting as well as Compiere or OpenBravo (and yes, I've tried out both - I'm not making these arguments blindly). They don't really have the complexity that calls for Dynamics or Oracle or SAP.
My point was simply that Compiere and OpenBravo don't have the accounting functionality to handle this complexity either - this is why it doesn't exist in that business space. Until it does (meaning, until CPAs and business analysts, rather than programmers, become involved in its design), it has no hope of displacing SAP or Oracle, except in the odd instance (like in Galenicum's case) where those packages are really overkill to begin with.
- by knowledgeblue January 28, 2009 4:22 AM PST
- We certainly can validate Matt's perspective. As a Open Source Systems Integrator, our Compiere Practice has the largest pipeline/growth in the history of our Company. Starting in 4Q08 and rapidly accelerating this quarter, 1 out of 3 prospects are now Companies that have or are considering abandoning their "big brand" ERP Projects for open source. They start the discussions explaining their 09' budget has been cut 50% and curious to understand the economics behind open source ERP - this is clearly the business driver behind the lead acceleration. The other key event we are seeing are Companies including open source ERP in the competitive bid process as a real alternative. We at the table on many deals, we would not have been 1-2 years ago, due to economic times and CIO's that are focused to innovate. Historically, our leads have been Companies that already adopted and understand open source, so Matt is right, times have change, and most likely continue throughout 2009....
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