An Open Source Community Attempts A Friendly Fork
Adempiere comes from an Italian word, meaning 'to fulfill' but with additional context of "to complete, reach, practice, perform the duties of, or free (discharge)"; meanings that are now used by an Open Source group's effort to defend the interests of a Community that has outgrown from the corridors of the premier Open Source ERP/CRM project which is named Compiere, also another closely meant Italian word, by its creator, Jorg Janke.
Much of the user community first appear in SourceForge forums, mostly either posing questions or helping each other in a voluntary and published fashion, associating with the goodwill provided by free and available source codes that was placed there by contributors in the first place.
The more contributive members of the community began to question the original Compiere's commercial patron, ComPiere Inc. openly in the forums and another active contributor site red1.org that eventually debated the pros and cons of forking this great project that has often hit the top ten rankings since it was formed about 5 years ago.
The eventual consensus leads to the forming of a friendly software fork that will maintain reverence to Compiere but promote an active contributive community that has code writing or CVS (Concurrent Versions System) rights.
Question of Staying Open
This phenomena shall be of great interest to followers of the Open source movement as to how long can Open Source projects sustain its momentum before caving in to commercial forces as happened with projects such as those based on Linux which has seen the spawning of numerous commercial brands such as RedHat, Suse, Fedora and Mandrake. What is unique about this application suite is that it is unlike Linux as its not utility based but in every aspect a full blown business application that has tremendous commercial interests and in competition to big vendors such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. Usually, Open Source effort even by such vendors have been to ride on utilities or small scale applications while their core business applications remain proprietary so as to reap the benefits of having a bazaar effect of creating a strong user base. Thus they give away smaller stuff to position their core flagship products. For Compiere to have no other core product other than its training courses, user manual sales, and thin consultancy services must have pushed their business model into unchartered waters. Thus, their recent success at getting a reported amount of USD6 million is of mixed blessing as now the commercial demands are heightened.
Many members of the community may emphatise with the apparent dilema the above question pose, but the traditional argument with Open Source has been that to remain free is like free air but not free lunch. You still make money, in fact lots of it, from branded consultancy and sale of time-based services.
The Bazaar Importance
Even though The Cathedral and the Bazaar story was long written for the movement, the opposing forces' end game tends to credit its author, Eric Raymond, that the community issues have eventual commercial significance. As part of the Compiere community's predicament is to make sense of the ever-changing licensing that is seen from one sub version to another. There is also a Catch-22 restriction that both allow and disallow the use of logo and brand name in the application. This begs the question as to how a brand or logo is entrenched in Open Source till it harvested enough commercial value and then decisively withdrawn back to its commercial owner - ComPiere Inc, and from the community that has been giving it the high hit-rate it enjoyed. Does the commercial entity enjoy legal cover and immunity from the community wishes?
The uniqueness of the Compiere project is also that most of its listed developers do not have CVS rights to the project, and development and progress of the source codes remain a closely guarded affair. Attempts to submit code improvements are hardly seen to gain namesake in any of the thousands of java source files within the source. This is not uncommon in industry but more moderated as in the case of JBoss where its founder, Marc Fleury openly invite developers to earn the right to be committers. He also openly writes and professes the merit of Open Source as a career decision for software developers, in his own words as amounting to 'taking the red pill'. JBoss also allow a high number of denominated software to co-exist within its repository. JBoss books and certifications also flourished. Its such charisma and other human development techniques that complement the codes to bring about JBoss proud community.
Thus, for want of some other industry-related comparison, we can see the community factor these two examples poses, of their living behavior that spells value or uncertainty in an open source endeavour.
Goals of this Project
In our experience, we have been working with Compiere for many years. We have gotten many satisfactions, and we have taken advantage of the great job made by Jorg Janke with Compiere. With the acquired experience we have a dream: to create a project that evolves from Compiere, a project with leading edge technology where everyone can share their ideas, with the GPL license, where the problems of the end users are listened to, where we can integrate our effort with the effort of others, where the requirements of business clients are heard, where our clients feel that they have true support, are in summary some of the things that need improving. Its for those reasons that we dare to invite everyone interested in this proposal, with a big desire of working and to support this dream together.
Adempiere Council
For the record i m pasting what was the former post i put in that didnt make the mark. The last para: "Goals..." was put in by Victor.
Adempiere
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Adempiere is a community driven project that develops and supports an open source business solution of the same name, that delivers Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management and Supply Chain Management functionality.
The Adempiere project was created in September 2006 after a long running disagreement between ComPiere Inc., the developers of Compiere™, and the community that formed around that project. The community believed Compiere Inc. placed too much emphasis on the open source nature of the project, rather than the community nature of the project, and after an impassioned dicussion decided to split from Compiere™ giving birth to the Adempiere project.
The project name comes from the Italian word meaning 'to fulfill' but with additional context of "to complete, reach, practice, perform the duties of, or free (discharge)", which was felt was very appropriate to what the project wished to achieve.
Contents [hide]
1 Project Structure
2 Goals of this Project
3 Adempiere Business Functionality
4 Adempiere Architecture
5 Adempiere Technology
Project Structure
As a community based project all are entitled to their say -and are encouraged to do so-, but for practical purposes the project is guided by the a Council of contributors, lead by Red1. The role of the council is to
to support decisions of the leader
accept contributions
define the roadmap
review and approve specifications
vote for new functionalities
approve changes to core
[edit]
Goals of this Project
The goal of the Adempiere project is the creation of a community developed and supported open source business solution. The project's community believes that best method of attaining this goal is in the implementation of the Bazaar from Eric Raymond's famous article The Cathedral and the Bazaar. This commitment to the community distinguishes the project from other open source projects developing similar business solutions. These ideals are expressed and enshrined in the Project Charter -currently being written by the project's council-.
[edit]
Adempiere Business Functionality
The following business areas are addressed by the Adempiere application
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Supply Chain Management (SCM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Financial Performance Analysis
Integrated Point-Of-Sales (POS) solution
Integrated Web Store
[edit]
Adempiere Architecture
Adempiere inherited the Adapative Data Dictionary from the Compiere™ project. This architecture allows for the extension of the database Data Dictionary concept into the application, which in turn allows for the management of the application's entities and their validation rules, as well as screen layout & display logic from within the application itself. A WfMC and OMG standards based workflow engine is utilised to provide Business Process Management. These features allow for the rapid customization of the application to a business needs as it evolves.
[edit]
Adempiere Technology
Adempiere is developed with J2EE technology, specifically utilising the JBoss application server. Currently database support is restricted to Oracle and PostgreSQL, but database independence is a priority technology goal of the project.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adempiere"
Ah.. so it was u.. i shuld read the history Tab which tells us who puts what, or deleted what. As long as u registered as member, your id appears on what u did. Interesting!afalcone wrote:I put there the "Goals...",
jaztek wrote:We have jboss servers
Notability?
Red1 D Oon, you've taken this a long way from the original version. It's a lot more encyclopedic in tone now. However, I'm still considering nominating it for deletion, because the notabilty of the organization has yet to be established. It's not enough that it exists; it has to have had a quantifiable and non-trivial impact on the software industry. Please see WP:ORG for guidelines. And since your username coincides with the name of the leader of this organization, you might want to check out WP:VAIN as well. Thanks, and good luck! --Pagana 19:17, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
gba wrote:Let me first say that you made it to Germany's biggest IT news portal.
Here you can read the message about your fork:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/77954
how is the espanol version doing, it it being tagged for deletion too?
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests