Significant contributions from PATH, USAID, Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the UN Commission on Life-Saving Commodities, and others first helped shape OpenLMIS. JSI customized and extended the initial OpenLMIS code base (v0.9) for national deployments in Tanzania and Zambia in late 2013 under the name “eLMIS.” In 2015, eLMIS was also deployed in Cote D’Ivoire. OpenLMIS software development continued with the v1.0 release, which was deployed by VillageReach to manage vaccine distribution in Mozambique and Benin.

As new installations of OpenLMIS were developed and deployed, challenges surfaced related to the OpenLMIS software internals. A key challenge was the inability to easily extend the code base, which resulted in a “code fork” between the Tanzania and Zambia eLMIS implementations and the Mozambique and Benin OpenLMIS v1.0 implementations.

In an effort to address the fork, the community agreed to begin working toward a common master branch hosted on GitHub. ThoughtWorks created the “2.0” branch based on the eLMIS code line, and the community has kept it current with updates from both eLMIS and a new facility stock management project led by CHAI in Mozambique. Merges of project code to this branch were regularly performed until December 2015 at which point they were halted to prepare for a stable “2.0” release of OpenLMIS. The 2.0 release has the shared feature footprint of v1.0, eLMIS, and CHAI Mozambique as of December 2015.