What is Open Source?

Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge. The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration.

Open source software is computer software whose source code is available under a license that permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form.

If you are new in open source, you can ask yourselves what are the benefits of using an open source ERP:

• Freedom from vendor lock-in – the source code is available, there is no dependency on the supplier, and the investment in an open source ERP systems will last as long as you wanted to.
• Better quality, more stable, better tested – when the source code is available, it is tested by a lot of users, and the problems are detected very fast and solved very fast, without being hidden in the product.
• No hidden information – all the information are available, anyone can test the application and use all the functionalities
• There are no licensing costs for the application – the licensing fees for the application are 0, having as a result a reduced TCO if compared with commercial applications.