Last week I had the pleasure of moderating a panel where representatives of three xTuple customers discussed their experience with open source software. It was, for me, the highlight of an otherwise greatly-diminished Open Source World conference (formerly LinuxWorld). Unusual for a show that has historically focused on things like network switches and kernel hackers, the audience (in our session at least) seemed heavily skewed toward actual business users.
This was a very good thing. A lot of us in the open source world can get caught up in our own little private world of techno-babble, and sometimes miss the opportunity to tell our story to the larger audience of everyday businesspeople. It's like some of the later Star Trek TV shows, where they spent way too much time explaining the (fictional) details of space-time continuums, subatomic fluctuations, and warp coils.
We tell people this all the time, but it bears repeating: Open source is not just for geeks. In fact, it's really not a technical phenomenon at all. It's much more of a business process improvement - simply, a better way to make and maintain a product. The product just happens to be software.
And the more people get involved in the community of users, the better the product gets. Here at xTuple, we've seen a significant uptick in the quality of our product since releasing a fully open source edition of the software two years ago. And again, it's not just technical users - in our world of ERP software, the business savvy around how to use this kind of product in manufacturing, distribution, and retail companies is arguably more important than the core technology skills.
So it's in all our interests to grow the community beyond the relatively small group of open source enthusiasts. That's why it's so important to tell more and more actual non-technical user stories. What business benefit did you receive from implementing this software? Creamer Metal Products, a 60-year old family-owned industrial business cut expenses in half by implementing xTuple ERP, and grew aggressively to take advantage of new "green" market opportunities.
That's real business benefit, made possible by open source. As traditional technical trade shows continue to fade, maybe we need to spend more time sharing these kind of experiences.
Ned Lilly
In October 2001, Ned co-founded xTuple, originally called OpenMFG, with the aim of bringing the worlds of open platform software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) together to solve the unmet needs of small- to mid-sized manufacturers. In 1999, he was a co-founder of Great Bridge, an early business built around the PostgreSQL database which is also the core technology for xTuple today. Great Bridge was incubated inside Landmark Communications, a mid-sized media company where Ned directed corporate venture investments, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and startup activity. Prior to Landmark, Ned worked for a regional technology group in Washington D.C. and had a brief first career in political media — television, radio and a non-partisan news wire. He holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.A. from George Washington University.