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What is
ERP? Enterprise Resource Planning means total business management
software, designed to handle every aspect of your business from contact
management to sales/orders, fulfillment to shipping, invoicing to
accounting, from vendor management to purchase orders, receiving to
inventory, human resources to payroll, in one fully integrated solution.
Traditionally,
there have been three methods to achieve a true ERP. Grow your
own software from scratch, try to integrate a diverse set of existing
commercial applications, or pay for a commercial ERP system.
Off-the-shelf
ERP systems always seem to have a pre-determined set of business rules
in mind. The problem is, they may not fit your business. So
either you change the way you do business, or the ERP may not work
right for you.
Integrating
existing applications seems like the easiest way to get a custom
solution, but it is much harder than it sounds. Each application
typically has its own way of storing data, its own API, and its own
operational methodology. Furthermore, application providers
seldom make it easy to get into the internals of their application--a
must for a true integration project. And when applications are
not seamlessly integrated across the business, it makes it
difficult-to-impossible to query data across a wide range of sources
and parameters.
Growing your own
software seems the only way to achieve true custom integration.
But the size of the task has made it next-to-impossible for all but the
largest enterprises. Companies have emerged claiming to be able
to produce a custom solution for you, but it seldom works out as good
as it sounded in the sales presentation. And more troubling, you
get left with a product your own people don't know how to maintain or
extend. You are locked into your original provider for ever
whether you like it or not.
WyattERP has
released a set of tools created for the purpose of making it possible
for even a small enterprise to develop its own fully-functioning ERP
system. Your own IT people can learn to use WyattERP tools to
make a database-driven system to run every aspect of your
business. You can design your own system that runs according to
your company's way of doing business. You will own and understand
your design so you can maintain and extend it as much as you like.
Wylib and
Wyseman are open source tools used for creating fully customizable,
affordable ERP solutions on a Linux platform using the PostgreSQL database backend and
the Tcl scripting language. Wylib
provides an easy to use, robust, application framework. Wyseman provides a way
to create database models using user defined schema files. Wylib and Wyseman
interact with the PostgreSQL database to provide a starting point for a seamless
ERP solution.
Wylib and Wyseman are
released under two licensing options. This dual license allows for a fair
exchange, or Quid pro Quo, to take place between the licensee (you) and the
licensor (WyattERP). The source code for Wylib and Wyseman is identical for
both licenses. The two current licensing options include the following:
The commercial license: This license allows the licensee to
distribute commercial packages based on the Wylib and Wyseman products. Anyone
wishing to provide a product that utilizes Wyslib or Wyseman and is unwilling
to release their source code must use a commercial license. The actual terms of
the commercial license are negotiable with WyattERP. Please
contact us for more information. The open source license: This license allows for free use,
distribution, modification, etc. based on the rights garaunteed by the terms of
the GPL. What this means is that the licensee is free
to do virtually anything with the software as long as any distribution is also
licensed under the GPL.
To decide which license
you need, you need to take a look at how you will use Wylib or Wyseman. For
example, John's company creates an ERP solution using Wylib and Wyseman. As long
as this solution is only used inside the company he can use the open source
license. If John decides to distribute (commercially or freely) his solution he
must either a) release his solution under the terms of the GPL, or b) purchase
a commercial license from WyattERP. If John wanted support for Wylib or Wyseman
he must purchase a commercial license as the open source license comes with no
warranties, gaurantees, or support at all.
Since the commercial and
open source versions of the software are identical, feel free to download the
source code to see if Wylib or Wyseman is right for you before buying a
commercial license.
For more information on the GPL and open source software, please visit the
GPL FAQ and the
Free Software Foundation web sites.
Versions of Wylib and
Wyseman earlier than 0.30 were distributed under the Open Public License
(OPL). This license is not to be confused with the
Open Public License Version 1.0. For future compatability, do not use these versions.
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