Commercial Open Source Software

The relationship between open source communities and vendors keeps being a topic of debate these days. Simon Phipps at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference gave a talk about his “software freedom scorecard“, a method to indicate the approach vendors take to promote software freedom as part of their business strategies.

Matt Asay says we have to get used to companies separating their open-source efforts from their revenue models. We may be talking of  ”fauxpen source” vendors in this case - as originally named by Taurus Balog -  but it doesn’t necessarily cut open development out of the equation.

I want to make my point by having a look at how differently two companies have been building a business strategy around Apache projects. Continue reading ‘About Open Source Value Creation and Consumption’

Opentaps is a an open source ERP + CRM suite sponsored by Open Source Strategies Inc., and developed by full-time professional developers with the help of a community of contributors, recently adopted by Honeywell International.

Opentaps incorporates several open source projects, including Apache Geronimo, Tomcat, and Apache OFBiz for the data model and transaction framework; Pentaho and JasperReports for business intelligence; Funambol for mobile device and Outlook integration. Plus opentaps applications which provide user-driven applications for CRM, accounting and finance, warehouse and manufacturing, and purchasing and supply chain management.

Continue reading ‘Open Source ERP CRM: Opentaps’