Open Source ERP for .NET
Sunday, March 28, 2010 at 23:07 Tweet It seems like .NET might be getting a new free Open Source Project for the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). One of the candidate projects is called XERP.NET and is hosted on Codeplex. It is just 6 months old but the latest version of code has already got more than 1000 downloads.
There also are 15 developers and 3 coordinators. Authors claim:
XERP is the most complete Open Source ERP written in C#, Our goal is to provide both win and web platforms. Our combined efforts on this project represent many years of professional experience developing and implementing ERP systems.
The project has a MS-PL license (incompatible with GNU GPL). Codebase looks mature enough with the details.
Let's take a peek, say at the CRM Module, starting with its readme:
The generic XERP Customer Relationship Management system enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage leads, opportunities, tasks, issues, requests, bugs, campaign, claims, etc. It manages key tasks such as communication, identification, prioritization, assignment, resolution and notification.
XERP ensures that all cases are successfully tracked by users, customers and suppliers. It can automatically send reminders, escalate the request, trigger specific methods and lots of others actions based on your enterprise own rules.
The greatest thing about this system is that users don't need to do anything special. They can just send email to the request tracker. XERP will take care of thanking them for their message, automatically routing it to the appropriate staff, and making sure all future correspondence gets to the right place.
The CRM module has a email gateway for the synchronisation interface between mails and XERP.
So far so good, except for the minor detail. There is a mature Open Source ERP platform called OpenERP (GPL 3 license). They happen to have CRM module, too. It has a readme, too:
The generic Open ERP Customer Relationship Management system enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage leads, opportunities, tasks, issues, requests, bugs, campaign, claims, etc. It manages key tasks such as communication, identification, prioritization, assignment, resolution and notification.
Open ERP ensures that all cases are successfully tracked by users, customers and suppliers. It can automatically send reminders, escalate the request, trigger specific methods and lots of others actions based on your enterprise own rules.
The greatest thing about this system is that users don't need to do anything special. They can just send email to the request tracker. Open ERP will take care of thanking them for their message, automatically routing it to the appropriate staff, and making sure all future correspondence gets to the right place.
The CRM module has a email gateway for the synchronisation interface between mails and Open ERP.
How many differences can you spot?
I guess all CRMs are just made to be alike. To the point of having similar tables with similar logic (except for the differences in ORM organization). Here's a random pick: hr_timesheet_invoice_factor.cs (XERP.NET) vs. hr_timesheet_invoice.factor (OpenERP).
And the similarities go on across the code.
What do you think about the situation, given the fact that the newer .NET project is being developed under MS-PL license?
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Note, that unlike the previous blog post, this post does not outline the scope of the challenges that xLim 4 body of knowledge aims to solve efficiently.
Reader Comments (3)
http://xerpdotnet.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets
Comment from changeset 30802: "full openERP in XAF , (complete with every module it has) "
Still, licensing is an obvious problem.
Yes, that's the point (aside from the obvious ethical issues).
License does not say a word about OpenERP.
openERP's been around for years, used to be tinyERP and a year ago I had it up and running in Ubuntu with no issues using the standard CRM related addons. It seems useful for document based flows that need tracking and triggered messaging based on state changes. I think Enterprise is a misnomer IMHO. Just attaching the word .Net would probably give a developer branding power that seems like a safer choice. I think that would be sad.