metasfresh is an actively maintained fork of ADempiere and can be used and distributed freely. It does not require a contributor license agreement from partners or contributors. There is no closed source code, and the planning and development happen openly in the community. metasfresh was included in the Top 9 Open Source ERP to consider by opensource.com.
The feature List of metasfresh covers the majority of requirements of medium-sized enterprises for ERP Software and is comparable with proprietary ERP Systems.
In September 2006 the founders of metasfresh started with Open Source ERP development as early contributors in the ADempiere ERP Project. They were founding members of the ADempiere Foundation and longtime members of Functional and Technical Team at ADempiere. In industry-specific ERP projects in the SME sector they developed several new features based on ADempiere 3.5.4 and rewrote the majority of ADempiere Code to allow a more maintainable, flexible and scalable Software for midsize companies. The user base they built up demanded shorter and more reliable release cycles to allow more flexibility in providing solutions for their requirements. This, plus the already resulted gap in development compared to the latest ADempiere Codebase was the reason for the team to decide in 2015 to officially fork from ADempiere and proceed the development in a new project called metasfresh. Since releasing the code to the public on 6 October 2015 the community and development activity has risen quickly. Despite the fork's young age, metasfresh is currently one of the most active Open Source ERP Projects worldwide according to OpenHUB Statistics.
Differences to the ADempiere Project
After the fork from Compiere, the ADempiere community followed the open-source model of the Bazaar described in Eric Raymond's article The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The community and codebase were growing fast. The development mainly relied on the architecture inherited from Compiere, which had a tight coupling to the database. The architecture in combination with fast growing complexity leads into longer taking release cycles. Additionally, the license of ADempiere is GPL 2. Open Source projects with licenses compatible to GPL 2 are decreasing, so further development will more and more have to rely on own development which is a threat to a competitive development of Open Source enterprise software. With the fork, metasfresh is choosing a different approach. The main aims of the project are:
Quality Assurance: Building a modern architecture and decoupling the application from the data layer. The aim is to allow to extend the automatic Testing possibilities which are a prerequisite for shorter release cycles with extending functionality.
Legal: Completely rewriting the ADempiere code, to allow to switch the license from GPL2 to GPL3 to allow to choose among a larger amount of modern Open Source projects for further incorporation and development.
Efficiency: Consequent usage of Tools to enable efficient work from requirements analysis over development and testing until build and deployment.
Flexibility: Provide a highly flexible framework for business processes based on a new disposition framework which allows having functional extension points to allow external systems to bind with metasfresh ERP.
Currently, the time between stable releases including bug fixes and new features is 1 week according to the project's release notes.
