Support Policy

Openbravo ERP Professional and Community Edition maintenance and support explained.

For Openbravo ERP, two of the characteristics that differentiate the Community Edition and the Professional Edition are the life cycle guarantee and the bug fixing guarantee.

Community Edition users are expected to stay current with our product evolution and therefore to upgrade to the next version of our product to receive maintenance.

By contrast, access to packaged maintenance on a stable version for an extended period of time is a commercial service offered as an exclusive benefit for Professional Edition customers. We call this service the life cycle guarantee.

In practice this means that as a Community Edition user, you can expect Openbravo to fix defects that you report but, in general, the defect will be addressed in the development code line and made available to you as part of the subsequent major version. Community Edition users can receive the fix by either upgrading to the next version when available or manually transplanting the fix to their own code line.

By contrast, as a Professional Edition customer, you have subscribed to a service that gives you the right to receive a fix for any defect that impacts you directly in the version that you are using. This means that Openbravo will not only address the fix in the development code line but will also create a backport to the stable code line of your version and release a professionally tested maintenance pack. This way Professional Edition customers can consume maintenance without having to upgrade or develop a backport themselves.

In addition to the life cycle guarantee, the bug fixing guarantee ensures that defects affecting Professional Edition customers are addressed in a timely manner and according to specific service level agreements.

The combination of these two services, life cycle guarantee and bug fixing guarantee delivers a very significant value proposition for Professional Edition customers and contributes to the peace of mind that users can expect from a professionally backed open source solution.

Maintenance packs are exclusively available to Professional Edition customers. System administrators of the Professional Edition are able to go to the Module Management window, perform a scan for updates to discover the availability of a new maintenance pack and download and apply the update directly from that console (reminder: we always recommend to execute this operation in a test environment before applying a maintenance pack to a production environment).

System administrators of the Community Edition performing the same operation will receive a notification that the access to the maintenance pack is reserved for Professional Edition users and will be invited to acquire a subscription license and activate their system in order to proceed with the update. Alternatively, Community Edition users are able to update their installation to the latest code version by accessing the main Mercurial code repository.

This policy is summarized in the table below: