Openbravo ERP community and academia institutions

Universities have played a very significant role in the development of the Internet and open source. Some of the basic technologies in the open source space, such as the BSD based operating systems, the X-Window graphical system and many others, have been developed and improved in universities. Openbravo ERP is an open community which strives to maximize collaboration and welcomes contributions from the academia world.

At Openbravo, we have crafted a program aimed to help academia institutions to embrace the teaching and contribution to Openbravo ERP. We think that this program can help students to develop their domain of knowledge in the ERP space, gain experience in contributing within open source communities, experience in distributed software development, and in the use of tools used in business environments. In the other side, we expect them to to produce deliverables that are usable in the Openbravo ERP project.

If you are responsible for a program in an academic institution and you have interest in participating in this program, please contact us at collaborate_AT_openbravo.com. Openbravo offers a framework agreement for academia institutions willing to participate.

More information at Openbravo Wiki.

New Openbravo ERP and POS forums to discuss how to contribute

A few days back Carlos Romero was talking about how contributing to Openbravo projects is a win - win proposition. A clear example of this is how the 21 localizations projects that have produced deliverables are benefiting the whole community. In our Contributor's guides for Openbravo ERP and for POS there are more examples of areas where people are actually contributing.

We regularly receive requests asking how people can help Openbravo projects, how they can coordinate with the quality assurance or development teams, how they add a new feature, etc. To easy these conversations we have opened two new forums: Contributing to Openbravo ERP and Contributing to Openbravo POS. The objective of these forums is to provide a place were people can discuss these ideas publically and have more visibility on how they can contribute to Openbravo projects.

Do not hesitate to visit the forums if you have any question or suggestion regarding how to contribute.

Openbravo ERP Java libraries updated

I have been working on the past weeks on the library auditing project. Yesterday all changes were merged into trunk.

As part of the project, I have removed some duplicated libraries that we had in the project, reducing the final size of openbravo.war from 96MB to 46MB. I also also updated the rest of the libraries, as result now we are using JasperReports 3.0, something requested for a long time, and also the latest versions of the database access drivers. David Baz is also working on updating the Dojo Javascript library to the latest version too.

All of these enhancements are going to be part for Openbravo ERP 2.50. If you find any issue with the updated libraries, just let me know (jmas at openbravo.com).

Openbravo World Conference April 17-19, 2009 in Barcelona

The Openbravo World Conference's is an initiative put forth to share and fuel the growth of the professional open source space, namely in the Openbravo ERP technology. It distinguishes itself from its predecessors by putting a strong effort on third party contributions, such as from other open source projects, through a call-for-papers process, therefore covering a larger scope of Openbravo Community's interests. We will be welcoming to the community days (18th and 19th) all those belonging to the Openbravo ecosystem: developers, consultants, users, companies, partners, and newcomers. The access to the two community days will be free and will only require previous registration (registration will open in December 2008). Also, there will be a day reserved for Openbravo partners on Friday April 17th.

Throughout Openbravo’s World Conference, you will be able to meet with the main Openbravo developers and leaders, learn about our plans for the future, share and listen to Openbravo success cases as well as how to make business and complete successful implementations. We are building a program for the largest gathering of Openbravo ERP & POS developers, users and partners that will reflect Openbravo projects’ wide-ranging appeal and capabilities. The goal of the conference is to provide an open forum for ERP professionals and enthusiasts to explore and create the best solutions, getting first hand information from key Openbravo developers and other field experts.

The call for papers for the community days will open to everyone on the 1st of December of 2008. We will publishing a list of topics that we consider hot for this year and also the papers acceptance criteria.

We will keep you posted, namely through the event micro-site which will be launched in the fall. Please, do not hesitate to contact me (jmas at openbravo.com) if you have any questions or suggestions.

Why Open source is good according to Google

Today the Internet is thrilled by the imminent launch of a new web browser from Google called Chrome. More details will follow during today but it looks like is going bring more innovation to the web browser space, something like another open source product called Firefox already did in the usability and extensibility area.

A comic from Scott McCloud illustrates the motivations behind Google Chrome and explains why going open source for this product was the right decision from a Google perspective.
Reproduced under a Creative Commons license

Google focuses on why open source is good from a product perspective, mainly because it boosts collaborative efforts and helps to drive innovation.

At Openbravo we think the same. That is the reason why we sponsor a large part of the development of Openbravo POS and ERP and the infrastructure that makes them possible. We are also looking forward to introduce Openbravo ERP R2.50 which will bring a stronger product modularity, something that will be key to allowing to build an ecosystem of solutions around OpenbravoERP.