Oracle is a computer technology corporation best known for its software products and services like Java.
In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. They employ over 130,000 people, and sell cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems.
Oracle has a fairly prominent position with open source. They are a supporting member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process.
Through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle also became the steward of many other important and long-running open source projects such as the Java programming language and the MySQL relational database, introduced in 1995. The acquisition of Sleepycat Software, brought the open source Berkeley DB key/value store.
The company co-develops the OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition, and Btrfs, a B-tree file system. They also open source the Oracle Coherence Community Edition, NetBeans, and produce Oracle Linux which is a Linux distro compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code.
While Oracle develops and distributes open source software, they have many different business models. The majority of their products are published under a proprietary license. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Oracle’s products.
Oracle Business Process Management, a member of the Oracle Business Process Management Suite, is a complete set of tools for creating, executing, and optimizing business processes.
Oracle Business Process Management is proprietary software. What are the best free and open source alternatives?
1. Bonita Open Solution
Bonita Open Solution is a business process management and workflow suite.
It improves business operations by connecting people, processes, and information systems into easily managed applications. Create process-based applications in a single day with Bonita BPM.
2. Activiti
Activiti is an open source light-weight workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) Platform targeted at business people, developers and system administrators.
Its core is a fast and stable BPMN 2 process engine for Java. Activiti runs in any Java application, on a server, on a cluster or in the cloud. It integrates perfectly with Spring, it is extremely lightweight and based on simple concepts.
3. ProcessMaker
ProcessMaker is an BPM and workflow system designed to optimize the business operations and workflow management for small to medium sized businesses and organizations.
It includes tools to automate your workflow, design forms, create documents, assign roles and users, create routing rules, and map an individual process quickly and easily. The software is relatively lightweight and does not require any kind of installation on the client computer.
For more free and open source BPM software, read here.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Oracle's Products | |
|---|---|
 | Business Intelligence is business analytics software that offers an integrated, end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System. |
| Business Process Management is a complete set of tools for creating, executing, and optimizing business processes. |
 | Database is a multi-model database management system often used for running online transaction processing, data warehousing and mixed database workloads. |
 | JDeveloper covers the full development lifecycle from design through coding, debugging, optimization and profiling to deploying. |
 | OC4J (Oracle Containers for J2EE) is a slimmed down version of Oracle Application Server. |
 | MySQL is a relational database management system. It runs as a server and allows multiple users to manage and create numerous databases. |
 | Siebel CRM delivers a combination of transactional, analytical, and engagement features to manage all customer-facing operations. |
 | TopLink is a mapping and persistence framework for Java developers. It is an object-persistence and object-transformation framework. |
| Web Cache is a secure reverse proxy cache and a compression engine deployed between a browser and web server/content management server. |