Open Source Software

Why does Forbes keep indulging SaaS/cloud vendors looking to pick straw-man fights? (see also “The End of ERP” – and my comments there).

Bryan from Acquia makes the point well that open source and SaaS/cloud are mutually complementary, so I won’t try to add anything to that.

Mr. Cohen quotes a passage from Richard Stallman that I actually agree with – the distinction between open source as a product development model and a social cause. Since my company developed our entire ERP software system from scratch (http://www.xtuple.com) – and then decided to make it open source in order to grow a community of users who would help us continue to develop it, I naturally favor the prior view.

Mr. Cohen seems to be suggesting that open source vendors like xTuple came into an existing marketplace, somehow ripped off the incumbents, and then burned the forest behind themselves so that no one could ever grow a decent proprietary software company there again.

I submit that it’s more a question of natural evolution – as software systems become more commoditized, this happens anyway. Competition increases, prices come down, and the best business model wins in the end. Open source is a competitive weapon for my company against the bloated incumbents who are overstaffed, overfed, and build all that bloat into their pricing structure.

We innovate in *how we do business* – not how we record debits and credits in the general ledger. Consumers win. Tell me again how that’s bad?

Here's the full article. You decide:

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The clients I work with frequently ask me this question once we are deep into the implementation.  I never give a straight answer.  You see, I believe you should know if you are ready and with the right preparation you will.  So let's take a high level look at what must happen before you will be confident enough to go live.

Initial Training Read more »

The Pentaho Data Integration tool is an extremely powerful open source tool for moving data from application to application.  I use it for automating data transfer between various applications and databases.  Why do things manually when you can automate

One of my current projects involved a requirement to upload exchange rates into xTuple's PostBooks application.   This is a mundane task that required someone to remember to do this on a regular basis and a prime candidate for automation.  As we are using the Pentaho suite of tools for data warehousing, reporting, and application integration, automating the exchange rate upload into PostBooks was easy. 

This has proved a very useful solution and so I am offering it back to the community.

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With the advent of xTuple's new extension architecture, it's easier than ever for software developers to write custom add-ons to the core PostBooks product. This also means system administrators may now find themselves managing multiple applications in addition to their xTuple ERP--each having a slightly different version number than the next. To help everyone keep track of which version goes with which, we've created the xTuple compatibility matrix. We hope you'll visit this page (particularly during the upgrade process). And if you're a third-party developer, we hope you'll add your own application to the growing list.

Publishing the version matrix at this stage was a timely move, as anyone upgrading to the 3.4.0 Release Candidate will need to consult the chart for important update information. Read more »