When we started opentaps nine years ago, our goal was to create great
business software from open source. And have we ever! Most people
wouldn’t have believed that enterprise-class open source ERP and CRM was
possible, but we did it — thanks to Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL,
OFBiz, JasperReports, and many others open source projects.
The world, meanwhile, has moved forward too. It’s no secret that the
future of software is mobile, social, and big data, and open source software
is moving in those directions as well.
What does this mean for real businesses?
Imagine being able to capture all your interactions with customers as they
happen: by email, on twitter/Facebook/pinterest, via text messages, or by
phone. Anywhere. Any time. Any how.
Then imagine being able to use that information to make your customers
happier — and sell more.
That’s what we think a wh... (more)
Is Blockchain the Ultimate Open Source Disruptive Technology?
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures has been talking a lot about the
blockchain recently, so I decided to learn more about it. I read the
Marketing the Blockchain e-book, watched The Grand Vision of a Crypto-Tech
Economy video and the video keynote of Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne at the
Bitcoin 2014 conference, and did some more research on my own. While far
from an expert, I do see some interesting similarities to the adoption of
open source software. Here’s what I’ve learned — please comment and
tell me if I’m wro... (more)
Eric Qualman’s talk in Atlanta earlier this month got me thinking some
more. I started to play with words: “social media,” “social
network,” “networking”…what did it all mean? Interestingly enough,
after a while the words themselves revealed a pattern. Here are my notes on
hotel stationery which I’d like to share with you.
Let me show you with an all-too-LA example:
In the age of television,
media was how content was transmitted: cable, satellite content was the shows
networks like ABC, NBC, HBO, and ESPN bundled the content and broadcast them
over media to viewers, who used... (more)
In this part of our series on An Open Source Business, let’s take a look at
our friends in the online music space and see what we can learn from them.
The Deal recently had an article about online music startups which should
strike a chord with anybody who’s thinking about or trying to make a
business out of open source. Look at what they had to say:
“huge numbers, lots of hype, a surfeit of hope and a major chance of
failure… some of the business models are inherently economically
unfeasible… It’s completely unsettled and more and more fragmented…The
rules of the industry and t... (more)
If you’ve worked with Apache OFBiz or opentaps 1.x, you’ve probably had
moments like this:
Q: What’s the difference between internal name and product name?
A: If your company wants to maintain an internal name for products that’s
different than the standard product name, then you can put it in
internalName. Otherwise you should keep them the same.
Welcome to software complexity.
When we design software, we’re making choices. Do we add features for
people who need them? Or keep them out to make things simpler for people
who don’t? As much as we’d like to keep things simple, we ... (more)
Si Chen is the founder of Open Source Strategies, Inc. and Project Manager for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM (www.opentaps.org).
Ken Schow
Rafał Kowalski
Guy Fighel
Mark Goldin
sonal maheshwari
Andrew Hately
Jason vanValkenburgh
Lin Zhang
Mariusz Malkowski
Kevin Lewis
Greg Dumas
Kihyeon Kim
