We’ve been asked this a few times by a couple of Filipino businessmen. They normally are surprised to find out that iDempiere is community backed and that there is no corporate backer to fund or develop it. They often wonder how the application can survive, grow and be considered as a mainstream alternative to other ERPs.
The GPL v2 licence gives the user the “freedom” to own, copy, distribute and/or modify the software. Since iDempiere forked from aDempiere in 2011, the iDempiere community has moved the application at a rapid pace of development ever since. iDempiere didn’t start from scratch. The GPL v2 license allowed the community to fork the original aDempiere source code and build from there. There are integrators, end-users, students, researchers etc. who spend their time (free or otherwise) on the project. There is an abundance of new developments, bug testing, reporting, plug-ins etc. that make iDempiere robust. The current production ready version is 8.1 which was released October 2018. The iDempiere history has proven that an ERP can thrive without a corporate backer.
As per the GPL v2 license, “The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software–to make sure the software is free for all its users…When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.”