Open-Source ERP? One Company Takes The Leap

[mazzy]

When Medal LP began looking to upgrade its business-management software in August, a half-million-dollar commercial enterprise-resource-planning package was out of the question. The company, a subsidiary of industrial and medical gas supplier Air Liquide Group America LP, wanted one application to handle accounting, general ledger, shipping/receiving, and sales functions more easily than its software from FileMaker Inc. Although Air Liquide uses ERP software from J.D. Edwards, which is now part of Oracle, the Medal subsidiary "would have been lost in all of that application's menus," Medal IT manager Andrew Holowka says.

Holowka looked to open source. Why? First, cost. But second, Holowka wanted something to run on both Linux and Mac OS X. He did some research and found OpenMFG LLC, which makes an ERP application that runs on the PostgreSQL database. "I went to the Apple product finder site and did a search," he says.

OpenMFG isn't a pure open-source model. The license makes the software's source code available to paying customers, and they can make revisions. But any improvements then belong to OpenMFG. "We bring those modifications back in like with open source, but we own them and push them to the main product," OpenMFG CEO Ned Lilly says. "This is like a proprietary GPL."

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http://www.informationweek.com/story/showA...700921&tid=5979