Hi All - I'm Michael Judd - you may have seen me lurking round the Compiere forums over the last 4 years or so.
I notice that you're looking at forking the code base and I thought I might share with you all where I am at - having done exactly that a year ago. I outlined my reasons at the time - but I think that there is a growing realisation that Compiere is not really open - and this is something I set out to try and fix. I've been working away behind the scences quite a lot on all sorts of things I thought might help open up the project. For example - I lobbied the OSI about Compiere's illegal use of the OSI logo on their website - as they did not have an approved open source license. This pressure resulted in Compiere changing its license to be in line with MPL and to remove the tie in on the logo's etc. However, eventually, I got sick of fighting against Jorg and decided to fork the code base.
So one year on - what have I achieved.
The strategy:
- The mission is to deliver a fully open source ERP2 system. I have some information on ERP2 - C-Commerce (Collaborative Commerce). This means no dependency on oracle or the pdf library. We have developed a pdf wrapper similar to the one I have seen around the place but engineered in to the JazzERP codebase. We have also been working on MySQL and Postgresql ports although I am short on both time and skills to complete the testing on this work. However, our port is significantly further than that compiere+postgresql project .......
- We want to generate a massive demand in mainstream businesses for JazzERP and in order to achieve this we not only need the full open source stack, but we intend to release a bootable cd on sourceforge. This will be backed up with an online user manual which is also free. I beleive this will help create a massive demand for consultants.
The positives:
- We have been at two trade shows in London - Linux World and B2B London. We have marketing collateral from this and we have been making sure that people in mainstream business know about open source business systems and JazzERP in particular.
- I have had a number of articles published in mainstream business journals - such as Business Risk Magazine (The magazine for the Institute of Chartered Internal Auditors in the UK) and I am writing for other mainstream journals such as CIMA Insight (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants).
- We have implemented JazzERP in a number of businesses including a number of implementations on ThinDesk (remote desktop on linux).
- We are continuing to promote JazzERP and are in discussions with two pharamceutical companies about implementing JazzERP accross Europe (if you're in Europe and have experience with Compiere drop me a line - we may need some help)
- We have developed a brand and have some recognition in the UK market.
- I have had some very positive feedback from one investor and I'm talking to another about the possibility of funding some of the development and marketing material. I've already set up the necessary business side from a legal / regulatory sense (I'm an accountant - why not)
The negatives:
- I haven't been able to interest many people in joining the project from a development - other than involving my own developers and a few people from the open source world. The result has been not much of a desire to update websites etc and the project has continued to grow more offline than online. I had hoped that people would join as they came to realise that Compiere Inc wasn't aligned with open source but this has not been the case.
- I've put a very large amount of time and resources in to this over a period of time and I'm very committed to making it work. However, I think the critical success factors are to market this product to the mainstream of business, to make the product and documentation fully open source and then to build a business on the global and regional marketing and support. I have a very detailed business model and plan on this that I have been sharing with investors (I'm in London and have access the some very large capital markets) so I can't share it with you all at this stage - but if we can all agree to work together I think there's a good chance we can all benefit from this and realise what might be a join goal of delivering the product.
So this is a long post already - and I haven't read all of the traffic before this ......
But to summarise - I really need to build a community around JazzERP. I have infrastructure in place for the build environment that I am willing to share. I have some websites and some information available in a tool that is designed for collaboration. I have some brand recognition and some customers.
I'd really like to your input, thoughts and ideas. I'd like us to be able to band together, agree some roles and then plan our activities together. There is some info on the Jazzerp.org site about the contribution model - JazzERP is owned by the contributors and I have created a legal structure called a Limited Liability Partnership that allows ownership and rewards from the business to be allocated to the contributors based on their contributions. This means that JazzERp will always be open source not only as a piece of software - but the contributors to the proejct will be directly rewarded for their contributions. It is entirely possible that people will make it their full time jobs to contribute to the project and they will receive a very good return for doing so. I don't know about anyone else - but all of my contributions to the Compiere codebase now have Jorg's copyright on them and no acknowledgement of my work.
Anyway, I'm sorry I can't go in to more detail at this stage - but hopefully some of you will decide to collaborate on this and we can move this project forward at a rapid pace.