Open ERP

Sourceforge recently launched the 2009 Community Choice Awards. Nominations opened on May 6th and will end on May 29th. Projects with the highest number of nominations in each category will be selected as the finalists. We hope to get your support to get ComUnion ERP in:

 

  

• Best New Project
  
• Best Project for the Enterprise

 

The Open Source ERP Guru put together an informative history of ERP applications: ERP History | Open Source ERP Guru

It all began with 5 IBM engineers from Manheim, Germany , working nights and weekends on the next big thing in software: ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning. The year was 1972, and the business software world was a spaghetti of systems, vendors and technologies. Departments could not communicate with each other because their software systems spoke different languages. Babel tower of custom applications. SAP was about to change everything.

They even have a Flash-based history timeline. Go check it out!

ZDNet's Dana Blakehorn posted an interesting article in ZDNet where he talks about ways companies can monetize open source code.

In a recent Slashdot article he cited, an executive of an open source company wonders if a business model around open source is an essentially flawed model as other open source projects produce free versions of the same extensions and utilities that they offer around their code.

The VAR Guy has another interesting post about a vendor in the US specializing in helping Universities implement Open Source ERP Kuali. According to the post, "universities [were growing] frustrated with traditional closed-source systems. In some cases, the universities wanted to make and share software modifications - but their software licensing agreements prevented them to do so. In other cases, colleges grew frustrated with high fees for bug fixes and maintenance releases."