Open-source Applications
Open source Application are making a big impact in the IT industry. In the late 90's firms where hesitant to use Open-source applications but now a big change is happening in the industry. More firms are preferring Open-source applications in 2008. The main reason behind this change is a reliable and low-cost application with the source code available to the enterprise. SUN Microsystems' acquisition of MySQL further validated the open-source market's worthiness.
Open-source Databases
The Open-Source Databases market at present is about $850 million and expecting a growth to $1.2 billion by 2010. But still the enterprises are mainly looking to open source databases to support new applications such as Web 2.0, Web-based applications,radio frequency identification (RFID), and other new workloads. The Open-source database will help in a much improved forms of content management systems, Joomla & Mysql is an example for it. MySQL & PostgreSQL leads the open-source market and are giving a tough competition to commercial databases such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL.
LAMP Server
LAMP stands for the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database, and PHP. PostgreSQL boosters have been promoting what they call a "brighter LAMP," which is Linux, Apache, middleware (like Java application servers) and PostgreSQL.
MySQL
MySQL is a relational database management system & has more than 11 million installations. The main advantage of MySQL is that the project's source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a sophisticated open-source Object-Relational DBMS. IT support more comprehensive DBMS features for transactional and data warehousing applications, or advanced database security features.
Linux OS
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system that uses the Linux kernel. Linux is the greatest examples of free software and open source development. Linux revolutionised the IT World .The source code is available so any changes can be made by the user. Linux is the inspiration for developers around the world to develop Open-source database & Open-source ERP.Now Linux is used in embedded systems to supercomputers, and has secured a place in server installations with the popular LAMP application stack. The most popular Linux flavour OS Ubuntu is making a revolution in the OS market & giving a tough competition to commercial Microsoft.
Open-source ERP
The main reson for the popularity of open source ERP is there is no license fees.That is not the only reason for the growing popularity of open source ERP applications. Companies has to pay a large sum of money for license fees for the commercial ERP vendors. Not only that it will not stop with the implementation process alone & it continued in many areas like modification and deployment. ERP Open-Source helped to remove all these drawback. The Enterprise can download the software programs & the source code.So they can modify it according to their needs. A readymade ERP systems like oracle & sap needs a lot of customization according to the enterprise need. This is time consuming & expensive.
Advantages
The main and foremost advantage of ERP is the cost factor. The ERP open-source has made it possible for Small & Medium Enterprise to enter the market owing to the cheap cost. Even Some companies feel that open source is not promising enough to meet the application deliverables. Cost factor is not a primary criteria for big enterprise they will only look for how it can help the IT infrastructure and company's requirements. Another main advantage of Open-source ERP is the Lesser dependence on the vendor.Open source gives everything readymade right from source code. So enterprise can customize according to their needs. But the big firms already implemented the commercial erp like oracle & sap will not prefer Open-source ERP . The open-source ERP main customers will be S.M.E but that market is also so huge.