Compiere's Community Relationship Management problem

Compiere does not get as much attention as a number of other free software projects, but maybe it should. It is a full "enterprise resource planning" and "customer relationship management" application, with support for a number of tasks, including marketing and sales, human resources, inventory control, and more. There is also a full business accounting package - an area which has traditionally been under-served by free software. Compiere has slowly grown over time, and ComPiere Inc, the company formed around the software, landed a $6 million chunk of venture capital last June. Larry Augustin has recently become a member of the company's board.

Compiere places a lot of emphasis on its open source nature:

Interestingly, much of that "vibrant, responsive, and knowledgeable" community appears to have decided to pack its bags and head elsewhere. The result is a new project called ADempiere, started last month. It would appear that - in the opinion of the developers behind ADempiere, at least - Compiere has worked on building its business at the expense of its community.

In the most important way, Compiere's community credentials are unimpeachable: it has released a large amount of useful code under a free license. Once one looks beyond that, however, there are some things to wonder about. It is a rare free software project whose installation instructions begin with "install Oracle." There is an active forum area, but the project does not appear to have a functioning mailing list. The Compiere web site talks about "products," but has no area for developers. Compiere may be a free software project, but it is clearly on the cathedral side of the spectrum.

It would appear that, over time, the communications between ComPiere, Inc. and the wider community have fallen off. Developers report frustration in trying to find out what the company is up to, and great difficulties in getting patches accepted - or even discussed. Much of the disconnect, perhaps, is a result of the company reorganizing its operations to absorb the incoming venture capital; the company also recently relocated, which never helps. But a reading of the discussion leading up to the fork suggests that the problems have been growing for some time. To the wider community, Compiere looks increasingly like a proprietary software company which is still trying to claim to be an open source company.

The community is also concerned that ComPiere Inc. may take the system proprietary. In the short term, at least, there does not appear to be a whole lot of evidence that this could happen - though the company does reserve the right to create proprietary offerings:

The same message states that ComPiere, Inc. has no intention of taking Compiere proprietary or trying to cripple it in any way. Even so, some members of the community wonder what will happen once the venture capitalists start insisting on results.

For now, in any case, the damage appears to be done; ADempiere has taken off, and seems to be gaining a fair amount of attention. The developers are busily taking on projects - ports to MySQL and PostgreSQL, for example - that Compiere has never been interested in pursuing. The first development release is available. This fork appears to have enough energy behind it to get off the ground, though only time will tell if it can sustain itself in the long term.

In the free software community, ignoring developers will often lead to a fork like this one. It is one of the freedoms we depend on most heavily; nobody can bring development of a program to a halt as long as there are interested developers willing to do the work. Often, projects forked in this manner come back together once the original organization figures out that it needed its community after all; the gcc/egcs fork is, perhaps, one of the best examples. Perhaps ComPiere, Inc. might want to consider putting some of its venture funding into wooing this community back soon, before things drift too far apart.

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