Wikipedia
Compiere (pronounced KOM-pyeh-reh, "to accomplish, complete, fulfill" in Italian) is an open source ERP and CRM business solution for the Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) in distribution, retail, service and manufacturing. Compiere is distributed by Consona Corporation and through a Partner Network, a collection of trained and authorized business partners.
Compiere was founded in 1999 by Jorg Janke and was a top 10 project in Sourceforge from 2002 for 4 years reaching one million downloads and 100 partners in 2006.
In 2006, Compiere, Inc. raised venture capital from New Enterprise Associates with the goal of transforming the successful open source ERP project into a growing and sustainable commercial open source business. In 2007, the company added new executives, revamped engineering and support processes, and expanded its sales and service channels . The Compiere product line expanded to include Professional, Enterprise and Cloud Editions while the company continued to maintain the open source foundation as Community Edition .
Like many commercial ventures built around open source projects, there was a degree of contention between company management (who sought to monetize the investments in R&D, Services and Support) and voices from the community (who desired that Compiere source code and business processes remained free and open as Adempiere at that moment and iDempiere some years later). On June 16, 2010, Consona acquired Compiere, Inc. Terms of the deal were not disclosed .
The application and source code is provided on the basis of the GNU General Public License version 2; this comprises the Community Edition. Also available for a fee is a Professional Edition with more features, a commercial license, documentation and support contracts.