OpenMFG Puts Out Version 1.3 of Open Source ERP

Published: February 21, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Upstart and open source ERP software provider OpenMFG last week launched the latest release of its eponymous software package at the Open Source Business Conference held in San Francisco. While the open source community spends a lot of time obsessing about key infrastructure programs such as operating systems, middleware, and development tools, it is high time that open source ERP suites started bringing down the cost of these programs. And OpenMFG thinks it is just the company to do it.

You may not have heard of OpenMFG, but it could be the one breakaway open source ERP package that the market has been hoping for and that closed source ERP software vendors have been dreading. OpenMFG was founded in 1999 by Jeff Lyon, the company's chief technology officer and a mathematician who made his living by installing and maintaining ERP systems created by SAP and Oracle. Lyon started the OpenMFG project because he felt there was a lack of affordable ERP packages for small manufacturers that didn't skimp on functionality and didn't cost an arm and a leg at the same time. So he started to write his own package, and he chose an open source development model to speed the process up and to get some help. In 2001, Lyon's work attracted Edward Lilly, who had founded Great Bridge, which had developed applications that built on the open source PostgreSQL database, and eventually Lilly joined OpenMFG as its president and chief executive. In 2002, OpenMFG bought the assets of Shopman, a provider of ERP and MRP software to small manufacturers. Shopman users were migrated to the OpenMFG ERP package, and OpenMFG now had a group of users to test its software and provide feedback and fixes.

Because OpenMFG is an open source project, the company's owners have an interesting twist that turns out to be a very strong asset, one that is much stronger and broader in an ERP suite than in a very low-level program like an operating system kernel. As it turns out, very few programmers in the world know how to tweak a kernel. But many hundreds of thousands have wide and deep experience programming ERP suites or tailoring third-party suites. So when OpenMFG gets customers, it also gets programmers. While OpenMFG only has about three dozen customers to date using its software, now, OpenMFG is looking for disgruntled resellers and customers who are unhappy that their ERP software suppliers have been snapped up by giants such as Oracle, SSA Global, Infor, and others to get them to not only buy support services for the OpenMFG suite, but to help contribute to the betterment of the OpenMFG suite, which has more than 700,000 lines of code.

The current iteration of the OpenMFG suite was built using a C++ development called Qt, which comes from a Norwegian development tool maker called Trolltech. Apparently, some 4,000 companies worldwide have used Qt to create their own applications, and OpenMFG is just one of them. The Qt environment was used, for instance, to make the KDE graphical user interface for Linux, and is interesting in that a single C++ program can be deployed onto Linux, Unix, Mac OS X (which is a variant of FreeBSD Unix), and Windows operating systems. The C++ applications interface with a PostgreSQL database, which is one of the many commercialized successors to the open source Berkeley relational database project that was spawned from the open source BSD Unix platform. While those other operating systems are supported, OpenMFG says that the preferred deployment platform is Linux. The program has been certified for Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linuxes.

OpenMFG is not an open source program in the strict GNU General Public License sense--where anyone can take the code, redistribute it at will, and make any modifications to the code as long as they are available in an open source manner. The open source model that OpenMFG has chosen is more like the way vendors in the venerable IBM System/38 and AS/400 market distributed their software for decades. Customers who bought licenses to ERP suites in the IBM midrange always got access to source code, which allowed them to make their modifications. (In some cases, they modified their applications so heavily that they were not able to get technical and upgrade support for the suites, in fact.) While IBM midrange customers had access to the source code, they could not redistribute it. To lower the costs of its software and to spur innovation, OpenMFG is using a similar distribution model, and any changes that customers make to the ERP suite get pulled back into the OpenMFG project so all customers can benefit. AS/400-based software vendors never required companies to give modifications back to the company for possible inclusion in future releases.

With Version 1.3, OpenMFG is getting a free graphical report writer and rendering engine called OpenRPT, which the OpenMFG company has released under the GPL at SourceForge. The company is billing this as the first cross-platform SQL report writer, but I would bet Larry Ellison's last dollar that there are lots of homegrown, cross-platform SQL report writers out there in the world--not to mention a few commercial products. This report writer works on PostgreSQL databases now, and will soon be extended to DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and other SQL databases by the (real) open source community--or so OpenMFG is hoping, anyway. Version 1.3 also includes support for links to credit card processing networks and integration with the big shipping companies. The company says that this is the second release to include code from customers and resellers.

The OpenMFG suite has all the basic modules you would expect in an ERP suite aimed at manufacturers, including modules for parts definition, master scheduling, inventory management, work order, shipping and receiving, sales order, purchase order, sales analysis, and the obvious accounting modules (accounts receivable and payable plus the general ledger). The software is available on an annual license basis for $15,000 for up to 15 users (but with volume discounts it can drop by a factor of five to $200 a seat). Companies can also get the software under a perpetual license for $3,000 a seat with a minimum of five user seats. (Yes, that is still a $15,000 ante.) But, the annual license fee is less than what many vendors of ERP suites aimed at medium-sized customers charge for annual maintenance for their products. So OpenMFG might be something you should take a look at. If you are a purist about open source, then maybe not.