Why Big Companies Are Choosing Open Source ERP
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OpenSource.com has an article discussing why Big Businesses are Turning to Open Source ERP.
Basically, when buying a system that you have to completely customize anyway, using open source just makes way more sense.
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I'm still waiting to see a decent Open Source ERP, all of them are pretty limited or pretty crappy, typically leaning toward crappy on all accounts. Some like ErpNext/Frappe look pretty nice, but are almost impossible to get to work because the shitty developers don't understand what portability means, and just assume everyone has the same computer, with the same tools, and the same libraries as they do and so don't even tend to document it.
That or they create some convoluted method of forcing you to use some crazy library manager instead of just telling you what the libraries are. In general though, Open Source developers sometimes get on some thing they think is revolutionary/disruptive/whatever but it's just a pain in the ass for the broader world, like the recent, bafflingly stupid obsession with Composer for PHP projects in recent years. Instead of just telling me to get a copy of some goofy XML parser, I have to do all this extra work and install tons of extra stuff just because you follow the whole "HURR IT HAS TO USE COMPOSER, HURRRRR HUUURURR" thing, which also means your autoloading class is 50,000 lines long and you're wondering where your optimisation failures are.
Most Open Source projects are total garbage, but some like Linux, gnutools, clang, BSD, etc shine through and are totally amazing, but over the last 20 years I've come to the conclusion most Open Source evangelicals don't even understand the basics of programming (hey, just like Eric S Raymond).
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I don't know anyone using open source ERP's on a large scale yet, mainly because of the support contracts you get with enterpise commercial systems and with all or most of your companies data being in this system - you really want a support contract even with in house development incase something goes wrong.
I also noticed the article doesn't mention and sources or any companies using open source ERP. And this is written by a guy who does Open source ERP Implemntation/customization so bias is likely.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I don't know anyone using open source ERP's on a large scale yet, mainly because of the support contracts you get with enterpise commercial systems and with all or most of your companies data being in this system - you really want a support contract even with in house development incase something goes wrong.
Agreed, and even a lot of closed source ERPs like SAP don't scale worth a damn either, I think the biggest difference is with the support contracts people feel better, where as if you hit a scalability wall with OpenBravo or something, you're basically screwed unless you want to hire some Java programmers. Even if SAP takes 2 days to fix something, that's a lot better for a company than something never being fixed, or having to setup all the outsourcing/insourcing to fix some internally mangled Java app.
I also noticed the article doesn't mention and sources or any companies using open source ERP. And this is written by a guy who does Open source ERP Implemntation/customization so bias is likely.
I hear that... this is typical though. They'll ignore 500 fail cases and concentration on 2 use cases and call it success.
