The Current Status of Open Source ERP Systems: A GitHub Analysis

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are widely used by larger and smaller enterprises to assist them in managing and utilizing data coming from different business operations. Although many ERPs are based on commercial solutions, there are many open source alternatives that are also being widely adopted by organizations (e.g., Odoo). Their characteristics and evolution as captured in online version control systems have not been investigated but they are useful as an initial step in order to understand reuse practices. In this work, we are examining the current state in the development of such open source ERP systems. We used GitHub as source of data of open source ERP systems and analyzed 11,500 open source ERP repositories that we collected. We investigated the volume of ERP relevant repositories over the years, their popularity, reuse in other ERP repositories and point out some characteristics of popular ERP systems. We observed that there is a sharp increase in the number of created repositories in recent years, while the large majority of them does not indicate an open source software license.