5. 3. 3  The user community

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:

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/).

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.