About ADempiere

About ADempiere

The ADempiere project was created in September 2006 after a long running disagreement between ComPiere Inc., the developers of Compiere™, and the community that formed around that project. The community believed Compiere Inc. placed too much emphasis on the open source lock-in/commercial nature of the project, rather than the community sharing/enriching nature of the project, and after an impassioned discussion decided to split from Compiere™ giving birth to the ADempiere project.

ADempiere - Where Did It Come From?

The name was first suggested during the Forking Debate by Carlos Ruiz. Its meanings was finally rendered onto the site as part of our declaration, which was written by Colin Rooney in Wikipedia.

The project name comes from the Italian word meaning 'to fulfill' but with additional context of "to complete, reach, practice, perform the duties of, or free (discharge), it also means to honor and respect", which was felt was very appropriate to what the project wished to achieve.

The ADempiere name was highly applauded by the community. Matt Asay interestingly commented it as 'lame' in infoworld blog. He has since then written personally to Reduan apologizing and even gave further airtime with more entries such as right to fork and rightfully innovative.

Project structure

As a community based project all are entitled to their say (and are encouraged to do so) but, with community members in over 30 countries stretched across five continents, for practical purposes the project is guided by a Council of founders. A leader is nominated from this Council to act as overall Project Manager. The role of the Adempiere Council is to

• to support decisions of the leader
• accept contributions
• define the roadmap
• review and approve specifications
• vote for new functionalities
• approve changes to core
• Liaise with industry stakeholders
• As the project progresses, more structure began to fall into place where a Project Management Committee takes over many of the admin and technical decision making functions within the project. The project will also have a barebone Foundation to handle financial contribution and corporate level agreements for the public benefit of the bazaar.

Goals of this project

The goal of the Adempiere project is the creation of a community developed and supported open source business solution. The project's community believes that best method of attaining this goal is in the implementation of the Bazaar from Eric Raymond's famous article The Cathedral and the Bazaar. This commitment to the community distinguishes the project from other open source projects developing similar business solutions. These ideals are expressed and enshrined in the Project Charter.

Such a project will bring about:

• A high-quality application suite

  • Well tested and reference by a critical mass of globally-spread users
  • An exponentially growing application suite of addons and feature enhancements
  • A maximised adoption rate when there are no barriers to its setup and howto guides

• A viable service-supported product by vendors:

  • Vendors prefer a globally acknowledged package
  • Vendors prefer to offer up-market value rather than low-level support services
  • Growing base of users ensure confidence at up-market levels

• Maximum developer participation

  • Non-commercial distraction or patronage from any establishment
  • Strict contributorship honouring and acceptance into aristocracy
  • Assignment of admin rights based on meritocracy
  • Compliance with Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Open Source Initiative (OSI) rules
  • Visionary and Visible Leadership

Politics

• In the footsteps of those giants before us, we believe in Meritocracy and Peerocracy (Linus Torvalds). As such under the 'merit' principle, we regard all contributors as Priceless particularly its parent, Compiere which is honoured as the Kernel Contributor and the primal reason this software bazaar existed.

  • However, under the Peer principle, Compiere's owner, Jorg Janke does not regard itself as a 'peer' to us, equal in contributing to a common public codebase. But the moment it does and sits down on community terms, then we are one.

• Out of ethics, we frown upon those who plagiarised the contributors' works without paying homage nor honorarium where due to the source of such contribution.

  • There are forks of Compiere that 'stole' its DataModel and code design wholesale but converting its codes with a parser technique, claimed it as their own but we know better.
  • We here do not make such ungrateful claims. We still acknowledge and maintain Jorg Janke and Compiere as the copyright holder in all the java classes that we modified and only introduce original authors and copyright where the classes are entirely new.
  • We do not allow the commercialisation of the ADempiere assets and encourage business partners to evolve their own business models under their own namesakes.

See also

• The historic debate, it all started here.

• Further History of ADempiere

• ERP_Comparison where an SAP Expert gives his analysis after 5 months into the ADempiere Project.