I like to look at most downloaded/active projects on sourceforge because it gives me an idea of what is popular in th e industry and a good indicator of trends. As expected bit torrent and p2p applications are the most popular for downloads. However open bravo is the most active project. I had a look at the demos:

  • The application is a stock tracking and accountancy tool targeted at small/medium businesses
  • Its web based
  • The layout is clean - with hierarchy menu + simple master-detail pages
  • the detail pages have tabs to hide some of data
  • the master (grid) table supports searching and sorting of content by clicking on the column
  • The layout is consistent and has icons making the site look a lot like a "windows style" application rather than a website
  • I like the fact that entities like an invoice have related objects feature - which shows all documents related to this document - perhaps it could be used in a software project
  • Its easy to export data to excel (although its always dangerous if you have people performing complex business rules on the exported data - no version control of their excel spreadsheets or proper testing)
  • application is built using MDD (model driven design) to generate the site, schema, sql
  • application is written in java and runs on oracle
  • application has been able to cater with different business rules in different countries

would it pay for a company like google or yahoo! to take a product like this as part of the online application suite for SMEs? Small business need email, office suite and a system for tracking paperwork, orders, stock and accounts. If such a system was built in an open way, plugins could be contributed easily - a salesforce.com strategy.

Could open sourcing an ERP platform make a project powerful enough to eventually take on larger SAP systems.