We are committed to Open Source because we strongly believe in an agile approach to software development. Open Source is at the heart of our company. The freedom, flexibility and fairness of an open source ERP project combined with agile development of our corporate software allows us to work efficiently to create added value for our customers.

Open source ERP systems have made a significant leap forward in recent years and constitute real alternatives to ERP solutions of proprietary software providers in terms of functionality, flexibility and efficiency.

For us, it all began ten years ago. In 2006, the open source ERP project ADempiere was founded and along with some of the first ADempiere community members, we laid the foundation for the joint work. We were involved in the development of ADempiere ERP from the very beginning. Together with a small group of community members we founded the registered association “ADempiere e.V.” with the aim of securing funding for the project. The ADempiere community is made up of various innovative software companies that implement ADempiere as part of their own customer projects and then return their improvements or new developments to the community. Since then, ADempiere has turned into one of the most successful open source ERP projects in the world.

In order to become independent from ADempiere ERP release cycles in our customer projects, we began to develop our own open source ERP software — metasfresh ERP. Together with our metas test team, we introduced end-to-end (E2E) testing to ensure the high quality of our releases. The short development cycles in the form of weekly releases enable our customers to influence ongoing developments more quickly.

The rapid pace of innovations within large open source ERP projects coupled with very short development cycles provides a real competitive advantage for our customers.
Using a powerful open source ERP software can result in an improved profit margin for the respective companies by significantly reducing license costs while at the same time increasing flexibility. For companies using a software solution such as metasfresh ERP, the huge community entails a considerable reduction of vendor lock-in, given the wide range of competent community experts available for professional services.

Open source software, or free software, is a concept that was brought forth by Richard Stallman in the 1980s when he launched the GNU project. Today, it is established in numerous modern companies and its distribution continues to grow thanks to its significant advantages. The quality of open source software is verifiable, as disclosing the source code increases the commitment on the part of the developers to provide high-quality code. For several years now, open source ERP software has been increasingly capturing the interest of leading businesses as a genuine high-quality and powerful alternative to proprietary ERP systems that are subject to license fees.

metasfresh is developed under an open source license (GPLv2 and GPLv3). The software can be downloaded free of charge.