Openbravo started under the name of Tecnicia S.L back in 2001. At the time, the company was looking for an open-source web-based ERP for its customers. Since no suitable solution was found, we started to build our own solution based on another ERP called Compiere, that was available only as a Java client at the time.
From 2003 and until 2006 five people worked full time on the project (the team grew to 11 people by that time) developing new functionality for customers of different business sectors. During the that time the source code was delivered to our customers.
At the beginning of 2006, Openbravo secured an investment of 5 million Euros with the public venture capital fund Sodena. The objective was to build the best open source web based ERP and become an international player.
On April 18th 2006 Openbravo announced the release of Openbravo ERP R2.0 and published the source code at SourceForge. We started opening our development process using the bug tracking, source control and public forums at SourceForge to carry out our development.
During the first three months of public live of Openbravo one of the most recurrent requests that we received was to add support for PostgreSQL database engine. After a few months of work and as an answer to our community requests we released a new version of Openbravo with support for PostgreSQL database.
On September 2006, just five months after publishing the project at SourceForge, the project was ranked project number 6 in SourceForge ranking. That month, Openbravo ERP had 18.128 downloads and 420 messages in its forums, showing the growing interest for Openbravo.
Since the beginning we believed that all the documentation of our project had to be libre and free. The initial documentation was published in SourceForge but after a few months we launched the Openbravo Wiki that helped to vertebrate the collaboration efforts around of our project. Also, helped to vertebrate the localization of this documents to other languages like Spanish and Chinese.
We kept working on opening our development making our roadmap publically available, letting people to prioritize it, setting up a IRC channel to ease the communication between community members, setting up our own Planet and publishing for discussing Openbravo Green, our next platform generation.
On St. Valentine's Day of this year, the Open Solutions Alliance was presented. Openbravo is a founder member and it has been working since its conception in establishing synergies with other projects and open communities.
Last April, one year after of our debut in SourceForge, the statistics for that month were respectable: 72 bugs opened (44 closed), 488 messages in our forums, 22.775 downloads (6.681 product downloads), 21 registered localizations of which four projects are completed.
What are the challenges for next year? Keep building the participation and communication channels and the necessary infrastructure to encourage the steady growth of our community.
Let's make it happen!
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