Openbravo reaches 1.5 million downloads

Today we have reached an accumulated 1.5 M downloads.

Cumulative downloads, and even better -monthly download rate-, is a great indicator of an open source project's interest. We are very proud to reach this figure after the first publication of code in April 2006. I interpret it as a sign of our long-term commitment to becoming the leading ERP in the space.

Also, since October 2006, Openbravo ERP has been on a monthly basis the open source ERP hosted in SourceForge with the highest download rate in the category. This is no less than 39 months in a row that the public has continued to choose Openbravo ERP over other alternatives. One download at a time, Openbravo is earning a solid reputation, and customers all over the world are joining in.

Thanks again and keep in mind this is just the beginning!

Openbravo wins prestigious 2009 BOSSIE award

Again, Openbravo has won an InforWorld's BOSSIE award to the Best of Open Source Enterprise Software. This is the second time Openbravo is presented with this award, one of the most renowned in the open source industry.

The jury reasoned:

"Openbravo impresses with a well-developed POS (point-of-sale) solution, procurement and warehouse management tools, financial and accounting features, and production logistics for shop floor oversight. Further, Openbravo's plug-in architecture offers the same sort of extensive modularity found in SugarCRM and traditional commercial applications from the likes of SAP and Oracle. That means your developers can extend system functionality without worrying about stepping on core functionality. And the entire Openbravo system is supported by a healthy set of alerts, role-based user provisioning and access control, and a good Web-based UI."

All of us at Openbravo and our ecosystem are very happy and honored by the award. We have invested a lot of resources and effort in building one of the best products, and providing all the community tools and professional services to ensure Openbravo truly becomes an alternative to proprietary ERPs. We have achieved a lot, but there is still a lot more to be done! Hopefully we can do it together.

Thanks for your support!

Buidling Great Communities

Tomorrow Paolo Juvara and I will bet at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, CA.

OSBC is the premier strategy event for the open source industry. It was founded in 2003 by Matt Asay, who is an Openbravo advisor. Paolo and I plan to meet several of our peers to exchange ideas and best practices.

Additionally, I will participate in a panel to discuss the nuances of community building. The panel will be moderated by Stormy Peters, Executive Director and the Gnome Foundation.

Key ideas I will voice include:

• The importance for all the company to become "community" and embrace community processes and communication channels
• The importance to lead and set example if you want others to follow
• The importance of recognition and meritocracy
• The importance to invest in tools to lower collaboration barriers

I bet you recognize some of the initiatives we are taking in Openbravo to make the above statements a reality.

I will share my learnings after the conference in a follow-on post.

Openbravo Network: Commercial and Community symbiosis

During the launch of Openbravo Network, many mistakenly interpreted Openbravo adopting a closed source development model. This is not our strategy because we believe there is a better way.

My previous post is a very illustrative example of how customers benefit from having an open community, and how the community benefits from having customers funding it.

All bugs fixed for Openbravo ERP are available in the development trunk and incorporated in the newest release of Openbravo ERP, which typically occur twice a year.

Openbravo Network clients benefit from having regular and timely access to bug fixes, both for bugs reported by them or reported by the community. They get the benefits from using a product which is subject to public scrutiny and at the same time enjoy production grade SLAs (Service Level Agreements).

Community benefits from the effort funded by Openbravo Network customers to fix bugs, which are readily available in the development trunk and periodically packaged whenever a new release is published (or even before, if –occasionally- a community maintenance patch is published).

If you use Openbravo ERP and want to see it improve, engage in the community.

If you use Openbravo ERP and want production grade support, subscribe to Openbravo Network.

You are helping yourself in both cases.

Yes, it does!

After an interesting experience with the Wikipedia, Openbravo is finally included in the Internet's encyclopedia for good. We have learned about obscure terms (at least for the uninitiated) such as "unsalt", "WP:COI", "WP:NN" "WP:AFDP".

It is clear that these complex rules have generated an extraordinarily amazing pool of high-quality content. Not an easy task to be achieved by a group of volunteers.

However, after this experience, I would like to suggest Wikipedia to include some beginner manuals or HOWTO guides. To name a few: How can you include your company on the Wikipedia? Do's and don't for a casual contributor; How to dispute/reverse an unfair decision?.

I also think there are some take aways for Openbravo as a community. When you are immersed in the dynamics of the community, you can forget there are beginners who are trying to make sense of it. Some of these will become the core members of the future, and you can not alienate them or they will never participate in the game. Building a successful community is about ensuring there is something in it for everyone, regardless of the level of skills or knowdledge they have.

Please, let us know if we are not doing so!

Does Openbravo deserve to be on the Wikipedia?

In case you didn't notice, Openbravo does not have an entry in the English edition of the Wikipedia, the fine community driven encyclopedia.

For some reason, the word Openbravo has been "blacklisted" and any attempt to create an entry about Openbravo gets automatically deleted.

The Wikipedia relies on a complex set of rules and policies which are enforced by the voluntary editors who are responsible for the quality of the site. Thanks to them, the Wikipedia remains an objective and dependable source of information. However, the "politics" in the application of these rules are, in many occasions, difficult to understand to an outsider. At least, this is my case.

I have opened a thread of discussion about the inclusion of Openbravo at
the talk page of a comparison of accounting software article. I have also requested it at the technology's requested articles page.

I would like to request the help of those of you knowledgeable about the inner workings of Wikipedia's community. If you believe Openbravo deserves an entry in the Wikipedia, can you show your favorable opinion in that threat? Can you help getting Openbravo out of the blacklist?

I know this is an argument Wikipedia editors accept, but I cannot understand why other fellow open source project are there and we are banned?

Sigh!

See you at the first international Openbravo community event

There is no doubt that Openbravo's community is growing very fast. The strength of the product -which has been in production since 2001-, and a truly open company vision, which places the community at the core of everything we do (from development and testing to documentation) is no doubt helping.

Born on April 19th, 2006 (the date when Openbravo's code was first was published in SourceForge) the following indicators clearly show Openbravo's community has enjoyed a remarkable activity:

• More than 350,000 accumulated downloads (today we have more than 1,000 average downloads a day)
• 1,400 bugs reported
• 41 registered localization projects
• 7,500 messages in 11 forums, with
• 172 individuals participating every month (17 are Openbravo employees)
• 67 registered developers in SourceForge.net (31 are Openbravo employees)
• 933 registered in the wiki (30 are Openbravo employees)

Right now I am getting the final confirmed attendants in our first international community gathering in Barcelona: the so called Openbravo Get Together and they look great! We have confirmed the attendance of almost 200 participants coming from 31 different countries representing all continents.

We will cover several topics, including business and technical aspects. We also will show case one of the first tangible results of the Open Solutions Alliance: the Common Customer View project's single sign-on.

For all of you attending ... THANK YOU and a WARM WELCOME TO BARCELONA! I don't have any doubts that you will enjoy the event and will help bring Openbravo's community one step forward.

For those that you can not attend, don't be sad: we will post the different presentations and summaries of the different sessions.

This is only the beginning!

Community built slideshows

Hafed Benteftifa at blidainfo has created a handful slideshows to describe some of the basic operations with Openbravo. He has made them available to the community and posted them in Slideshare.net (see www.slideshare.net/tag/openbravo).

Topics currently covered include:
- Creating a new vendor invoice document
- Creating a new material receipt
- Creating a new purchase order
- Creating a new sales invoice document
- Creating a new sales order document
- Creating a new shipment document

The slides are really good, and frankly pretty useful. Again, yet another example of the nice things that happen when you share your software with the community. :-)