ADempiere is an Enterprise Resource Planning

Enterprise resource planning

Enterprise resource planning systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application...

  or ERP software package released under an open source software license. The word ADempiere in Italian means "to fulfill" or "to accomplish".

The software is licensed under the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

.
The ADempiere project was created in September 2006. Disagreement between the open-source developer community that formed around the Compiere

Compiere

Compiere is an open source ERP and CRM business solution for the Small and Medium-sized Enterprise in distribution, retail, service and manufacturing...

 open-source ERP software and the project's corporate sponsor ultimately led to the creation of Adempiere as a fork

Fork (software development)

In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a legal copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software...

 of Compiere.
Within weeks of the fork, ADempiere reached the top five of the SourceForge.net

SourceForge.net

SourceForge is a web-based source code repository. It acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development. The website runs a version of SourceForge Enterprise Edition, forked from the last open-source version available...

 rankings, and has remained one of the top-ranked open-source projects since then.