Open ERP

I read an interesting blog post today from Michael Dizon, who used to be a Senior Lecturer at the UP College of Law and whose interests, among others, is ICT law, policy and practice, and Free and Open Source Software or FOSS.

Many business executives are looking for more ways to cut costs during these tough times and have a mandate to "do more with less." Open source software fits the bill perfectly as it has little or no upfront costs, licensing flexibility (often times you can install on as many PCs you want and for as much users as you need) , development flexibility (the source code and APIs can be customized, the platform and toolkits are readily available), and the fact that many open source projects actually have better and larger support communities than proprietary products.

This year may actually be a turning point in the adoption of open source software as projects steadily mature (think Linux and MySQL) and interest among corporate users grow. According to a report released by research firm Gartner in November of last year, the adoption of open source software is becoming pervasive among large multinational organizations. Of the 274  surveyed by Gartner, 85% said they were currently using open source in their enterprises and the remaining 15% said they expect to use it in the next 12 months.

It looks like open source DB developer Ingres is doing a bit of guerrilla marketing launching a video campaign on Youtube to dispel the myths around open source software. For their first video, they are tackling commonly held myths around the security of open source software.

Read some posts, news items and press releases today about the growing adoption of open source in Southeast Asia:

The folks over at Pingdom in their Royal Pingdom Blog have collected the financial information of some of the most popular open source software companies.

No surprise that it is only Red Hat so far that has had runaway success with a business model purely around open source. They are a publicly listed company, and in a partner event I attended last year, made a big deal about the fact that their revenues have been consistenly growing year on year and are well over US $500 million (and if their growth continues, will join the mythical billion dollar club of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle soon if they are not acquired or bought out first along the way).

For Novell and Sun Microsystems, the money they make from open source software is harder to pin down as they are  large, very diversified companies (but with open source a key component of their strategy--as the recent acquisition of MySQL by Sun and SuSE by Novell has shown). Same goes for IBM or Oracle.

Happy New Year to everyone! This year promises to be an exciting one as we try to move to Beta and a stable release.