One of my relatives is a SAP ERP marketing professional who is quite involved in SAP servicing and installations at client offices here in India. Whilst I&#x27;m a freelance developer who works mostly in FOSS tech, so naturally our interests clash!<p>Frankly, I&#x27;m quite surprised that how these big clients of the muggle world are willing to pay crores of rupees (that&#x27;s still multiples of a hundred thousand USDs) to purchase a proprietary software. Whilst we have proven and secure stuff like linux, postgres, mysql, php, etc. just freely available in the FOSS world, who in their right minds would like to pay a fortune to buy a proprietary piece of crap which basically accomplishes the same thing?<p>Guy says that when a company here grows above a certain level and starts earning higher turnovers, they don&#x27;t seem to mind software expenses too much, I guess it is the same as the usual Apple vs Android syndrome.<p>I tried to convert him a lot telling him about FOSS alternatives like SugarCRM, OpenBravo, ERPNext, etc. and suggested that he recommend these to his clients, instead. But he seems to be sold on the SAP &quot;brand idea&quot;. Frankly, I cannot push further on this matter since I myself don&#x27;t know much about a fully-integrated ERP system, as most of my freelance projects are just small Web&#x2F;Android apps. But I do know that given the technology (LAMP, postgres, etc.), it shouldn&#x27;t be a difficult thing to achieve. After all, SAP is just an over-bloated RDBMS that does some data-manipulation, however complex it might be, right?
Is there really no FOSS equivalent to SAP?