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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Hasura [0], Postman [1], and ERPNext [2] are leading the FOSS charge from India. In ERPNext's case, they remained bootstrapped for 10 years (seed investment from rainmatter.in in Nov 2020) despite having to compete with SAP.

[0] https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine

[1] https://github.com/postmanlabs/newman

[2] https://github.com/frappe/erpnext

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I didn't have a good experience with ERPNext. It is neutered and using it is painful to use unless you pay for professional help. They bundle everything in a virtual machine file (!!) and not standard Docker containers. The whole thing is horribly put together. I spent half a day trying to get it up and running and it was a nightmare.

ERPs and MRPs are in a weird uncanny valley. 99% of the audience that need to use it are not programmers. Open sourcing is nice but largely only helpful to people that are going to forkit and improve it, not end users. Also, ERP is the brains of your business. If it goes down and has problems, your business comes to a halt. It needs to be rock solid and most businesses don't want to deal with this type of thing - happy to pay $300/month for small business ERP from Oracle, SAP, Microsoft or other platforms. I am complaining but its better than nothing, the fact that theyve put their code out for free is commendable.

* They bundle everything in a virtual machine file (!!) and not standard Docker containers*

Glad someone is mentioning this. Did not have a good experience with ERPNext. Why is it written on an obscure framework: Frappé, named after the programmer. If I'm using Python web framework, flask or Django.

Author here. This is wrong information. Not sure where you are getting this from.

Also as I mentioned above, docker installs are actively supported.

https://github.com/frappe/frappe_docker

There are standard docker images available [0]. Not sure why you would you virtual images when there is an easy install script and a docker.

While I agree it’s a complex beast (it’s an ERP system), there is a large community [1] and active forum.

Also if you are happy paying $300/month for a proprietary product, why would you expect the same for $0 from an open source product?

[0] https://github.com/frappe/frappe_docker

[1] https://discuss.erpnext.com

Their VM is for testing and they have docker for production.

I believe they've VM for testing before docker was known.

Thanks for letting me know about EPRnext (I suppose they are well known, but hey my bandwidth is pretty limited). I really like the idea (although I dont like the DB choice or the framework), I will still poke around

ERPNext is just using FOSS as a reason for being mediocre. They tick all the feature list that proper ERP may required, none are tested, lots of bugs, most are solved to introduce more bugs. Usability achieved once you know the bugs and start to live with it.

Open source does not come with any warranty. You are welcome to spend your time and fix what you feel is broken, or pay someone for it.

ERPNext has a large and active community with thousands of active installs, and bugs are constantly being fixed and enhancements being pushed.

Unfortunately an ERP system needs time and effort to configure correctly, and what you consider bugs, might just be things that you need your accountant to tell you about.

I can live with the known bugs. I can not live with the new bugs in previously functioning features, just because something somewhere else is changed. Since I believe in FOSS, I’m paying customer since 3 year and going to stick with it. But many many a times our team needs to resort to spreadsheets.

ERP is hard and heroic efforts on you and your team’s part to make it reality. Keep pumping.

A huge vote for Postman. Used it a few years back. Was an awesome tool. Hope it still is.

Also Julia I think?

IIRC Julia team is based in one of the California universities, unlike Postman, whose headquarters are in India.

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