Is There a Free Software EDI Solution?

pi_rules asks: "I'm by no means an expert on EDI software (stuff used to communicate purchase orders, invoices, ship notices, etc., electronically) but from a programmer's point of view I'm dismayed at what the market for this stuff looks like right now. Looking at the specs to the documents it doesn't seem like an overly daunting task to implement a solution on a business-by-business basis; however the only commercial solutions out there are huge, expensive products. I'd like to know what other people who have worked with EDI software can tell me about what they need their software to do; and if they have a solution if they could give me a general over-view of how it even works. My intention here isn't to beat up on existing EDI solution providers really; it's just that I want to see a solution that's 'geek-friendly', and beneficial to businesses by setting up a system that will provide them software that not only functions, but does the job lickety split."

"After shelling out $10,000 for one of these products we found it to be: slow (incredibly slow), unintuitive, and it didn't even work! Of course, the company is clueless as to how to fix the problem. Granted we've only tried one vendor, but this was the one -recommended- to us by our customer. After asking around, it turns out that other businesses with similar needs had to hire in programmers to write their own custom solutions.

I'm entirely capable of writing the software to handle our situation here but I'd like to start a Free Software project out of whatever I make. The problem is that I know little about this massive standard and the Right Way to go about constructing software to do the task. The standard is absolutely HUGE, and can vary significantly from vendor to vendor I'm told."