Recent economic conditions have accelerated the trend to bring open source principles to business software. Sourceforge publishes a Top 25 Projects at the end of each month, and as of August 31, the top 3 positions were all held by open source ERP programs.

The top of the list was PostBooks® ERP & CRM by xTuple. This is also the product that Friendly Systems, after reviewing many of the open source ERP options for several months, has decided to become involved with.

There are two business models for open source – some make the software completely free, and others, like xTuple, have a dual license model. xTuple PostBooks® Edition software is free, and the Standard and Manufacturing Editions are commercial offerings with both subscription and perpetual license pricing. The commercial editions offer additional features, but even the free PostBooks® Edition is a true mid-market product. Though it has the features, such as multi-lingual and multi-currency, to be used internationally (and it is), xTuple is produced in the United States, and there is a company behind it, not just a community of programmers.

See our web page about xTuple for more information.