The Adempiere ERP is an interesting open source project started as a forking project from the Compiere ERP application which has a design history started in 1982 by Jorg Janke who has a strong background in ERP, SAP, Oracle, Active Dictionary, Java and Financials and which has been t sponsored in 2000 by Goodyear in Germany.
Compiere made its debut as a an Open Source project in SourceForge.net in June, 2001 and received venture capital funding in the early months of 2006.
In September 2006 the large community concerned about commercial pressures to make Compiere closed, started an intense public discussion about forking the project and finally decided to start a new project called ADempiere
Currently the Adempiere ERP is described on the site Adempiere.org as follows
“ADempiere Business Suite is an industrial strength open-source software solution that combines ERP, CRM and SCM support for business process. ADempiere provides a framework for extending and customizing to meet business needs”.
You can read more about Adempiere on the Books-Software.com blog.
