openbravo network

Openbravo network is an ERP appliance based on Openbravo ERP software. Long time ago I participated on the implementation and was a very interesting experience. The appliance was made with rPath technology, the first company making software appliances as far as I know that have an excellent tool for managing them.

The distro was based on RedHat. It was very interesting to see how they were using RedHat's SRPMS and migrating them to their own package management.

rBuilder, the rPath server for making software appliances, is very well thought and you can see they have very good engineers behind. Also the support they were providing by IRC was very very good.

The package management they use, is kind of a mix between traditional package managers and version control systems like svn or bazaar, and that makes it a little difficult for the beginner to start making appliances using their system. Sometimes you need to understand a lot of things to get some simple things done. I think that is the main problem they have, but it is only my opinion ;) . And that is one of the strengths of SUSE Studio. If you are an alpha user, you must have seen how easy is to create an appliance. That is a very good point.