Good question, that's why we put it at the top. Yes, the PostBooks Edition of xTuple ERP is free software – and many of our partners make a good living doing nothing but professional services and support for PostBooks. But there are two commercially-licensed Editions of xTuple ERP as well, and partners earn generous commissions on sales of those products. And other xTuple products and services – such as training classes, network services, even hardware appliances – are commissionable as well. Some of those things you might prefer to offer yourself; that's fine with us, and we don't get in your way.   With this range of offerings, xTuple partners have a solution for a variety of business needs and budgets. As one of our partners once told us, they have the best of both worlds!  

  No. xTuple is designed to meet the needs of small to midsized businesses who are not likely to have a programmer on staff. And we're not going to force our partners into programming if that's not their business. The fact is, xTuple ERP is easy to install because it has to be. And xTuple provides our partners with unlimited technical support through all phases of the customer engagement.   However – if you do enjoy digging deeper into the code, there are terrific additional revenue streams to be realized in developing new base functionality sponsored by a customer (our favorite kind), custom screens and scripts, and of course custom reports with the embedded OpenRPT report writer.  

  Absolutely. Both the client and the server software run on Windows – as well as Mac OS X, Linux, and even other Unix systems. You – and your customers – can mix and match however you like, leveraging investments in existing technology without having to buy all new systems. That of course frees up more money for you.    

  This is an interesting one. The answer is no – and in fact, there's a pretty good argument that Open Source systems are more secure than traditional software.   “Huh?” you say. It does sound a bit odd – that a product with freely-viewable source code could be more secure than something that's locked up and “hidden.” But in fact, with the enforced vigor and peer review inherent to open source, potential vulnerabilities are identified and fixed much more quickly and easily. In one well-publicized event, an application was open-sourced by a vendor who had been “supporting” this application to customers including large banks and the U.S. military for years. Within 24 hours of the source code being publicly available, a major back door security hole – which had been there for years – was identified and fixed by an open source developer looking at the code for the first time!