The community of free software users plays an important role in Openbravo's business strategy. The following sections examine its main aspects.
Open Source Strategy
To identify Openbravo's Open Source strategy, we need to consider the specific features of the product development methodology and the business structure used to exploit them.
The kernel of both products is primarily developed internally within the company and public repositories and an active user community are maintained around it. For the development of complements, customisations and extensions to the original product, both the user community and partners play a part.
Partners must be examined separately because they correspond to the exploitation of an opportunity by a different organisation.
Nonetheless, Openbravo uses an Open Source strategy that combines different orientations:
In its product development and review, the strategy used is similar to Open Monarchy, mainly due to the internal development of the product kernel, the public repositories of source code, the company's final acceptance of changes to the kernel and the planning of product development (for example, the established roadmaps).
In the development of complements (documentation, etc.), the strategy is more similar to Consensus-based Development, due mainly to its development within the user community.
And lastly, the strategy for the development of extensions and customisations depends on the developer who implements them. If they are projects carried out within the community (using the resources offered by Openbravo), they are possibly more similar to the Consensus-based development model, while if they are developed by partners, they will depend both on the strategy in question and the features of the development.
Partner strategy
If the partner develops extensions of the original product, the Open Source strategy will depend as much on its business philosophy as on the features of the product (for example, the MPL is more flexible with proprietary modules than the GPL).
Community structure
The Openbravo ERP user community is defined and structured as a meritocratic system: there are several levels of collaboration and each is defined by the knowledge required for this level, the amount of contributions made, responsibilities and privileges.
For Openbravo ERP, there are three different collaboration profiles (developers, functional experts and testers), while in the case of Openbravo POSITION, there are only developers. The members of the user community organise themselves and are distributed into active projects in the community.
Resources available to the community
Openbravo offers a range of resources (some in more than one language) for the community and for its partners or general users. These include:
Recommended website
All of the resources mentioned can be accessed from the company website (http://www.openbravo.com/).
Corporate website
Partners area
wiki project
Portal for the Openbravo user community
Employee blogs
Forge for products (Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS)
Bug tracker
University
Mailing lists
Openbravo code repository
Openbravo news service
The user community can refer generally to a specific guide in the wiki explaining how to collaborate with the project. It also has an exhaustive list of communication channels that it can access. The roadmaps of each product complete the resource guide for the user community.