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Baan IVc/V - The First Open-Source ERP?
SlickJim asks: "Baan, up until recently a major name in the Enterprise Resource Planning [ERP] Market, is in trouble -- last time I checked market capitalization was down from a high around $8 billion to something around $0.5 billion.
as shown in this company profile. Possibly it will be bought out by one of the usual "strip 'em milk 'em" suspects -- CA, Geac or some other big business software vendor. A buyer would have to make an enormous investment, in technology and marketing, to restore confidence in the product. This investment would probably wipe out any likelihood of making a profit by selling licenses. So what would happen if Baan released the code for their ERP platform under an Open Source licence?"
ERPimplementations are about business process and business requirements. Buy any ERP 'toolset' and take the box home. Open it up. What you will find inside is 2 pieces of paper. One says "you now have the right to hire gobs of consultants" and the other says "think very very very hard about how you want to run your business". If it were just a matter of implementing a bunch of modules then 80% of the attempts would not fail. Problem is that customers all think that ERP kits are silver slugs you can pull off the shelf, install and you're up & running. Not true. Not true. And while all of the so called experts decry ERP vendors for lagging with web integration the truth is that most customers don't understand their own businesses or their own processes and didn't design any of that to begin with. What they have is a bunch of organic business functions that grew up over time independent of each other. The ERP kits are deployed and what you end up with almost everytime is a paved cowpath. Just an automated way of doing the same wrong thing faster.
We are doing something similar for FSF. We have a few hundred people on the list that are interested and several core coders. One company actually helping fund development. So there is a need. http://www.gnue.org
The other players in that market would look through it and take the good ideas to use them in their own products, that's what would happen, and that would be all. ERP tools are not something hackers have uses for, so you wouldn't find people for an actual OSS development project.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Noone cares about the license of an ERP usually. What is interesting to the customer is interfacing it with existing (mostly financial) apps and the accompanying support contract. And the licence does not change this. So a change in licence will not do a thing. Besides PR of course...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
First, I believe an large UK software house announced an agreement in principle to purchase Baan about three weeks ago, so they won't be independent for much longer.
More importantly, "historically" (by which I mean in the 1970's and 1980's) ERP software (then usually called MRP II) was actually very close to the open source model. In that: (i) you received source code with your purchase (ii) you were free to modify the source code in any way you so desired, with the level of support from the vendor for your modified code varying depending on how complex your modification was and how much you were willing to pay (iii) vendors would capture thier clients' mods and often roll them back into the base product (iv) for some products, there was an active process of exchanging mod code among customers independent of the vendor.
(iv) is perhaps most interesting. Some vendors actively encouraged and supported the distribution of mods, some looked the other way, and a few tried to license or discourage communication among clients. A few vendors, such as ASK, actually encouraged their customers to communicate among themselves and form independent advocacy organizations.
Today the situation seems to be more restricted. A few vendors still distribute source code, but usually under fairly tight licensing restrictions. Most low- and mid-range vendors are only distributing executables now. High end is another story, but those contracts are all negotiated on an individual basis.
sPh
They won't be. Why? They get most of the source already.
No company is very alike and all their software must be customized. Companies like SAP and Solomon (I don't know about BAAN) Basically provide the source and allow for rewrites and tweaking to fit certain business models. Now most companies don't have people who can read it so it doesn't matter anyway. But in its own way it is open. When we deal with Solomon we have our own people writing modules along with Solomon people. This makes for a happier experience all the way around I will tell you :).
Marc