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Injustice, plagiarism and insult of community work

 

Hello Fabien and the Open ERP community,

I request your attention to this post dated 2nd of May:
http://blog.openerp.co.in/?p=400

It is a clear duplication of work done by Open ERP SA on the community
module 'Powerwmail' .

I am not surprised but shocked to see this trend repeating again and again.
Why is it that the community ideas have to reinvented by Open ERP SA in a
different name everytime? It happened with scenario, rml and now I think it
is right time to question whether its the right ethics for an opensource
project ? To retain the copyright on the Open ERP code Open ERP SA goes to
any extend?

I understand that it is Open ERP business model that 800EUR (or may be more
because of the heavy code) is what is needed for a module to be 'certified'.
Is it because the community cannot pay for a community contribution that the
effort is duplicated? Well I think contribution of such useful features
itself makes openerp more that worth 800EUR because till today I have
received numerous mails saying how the work saves every developer couple of
days. This is strongly disappointing for any community contributor. What is
the point in releasing the code if it is next day going to be duplicated by
your paid employees? What is the point of the community if the credits are
all for open ERP SA?

I draw the attention also to the commitment made by fabien and antoine at
the community days in Belgium to all those present there that poweremail
would be drawn into official 6.0. I request you to respect the community and
your own words.

Have a look at the duplicated work:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~openerp-commiter/openobject-addons/trunk-mod3-local/annotate/head:/fetchmail/fetchmail.py
The model structure is 90% similar. Logic is 99% similar.

I wonder why you could not contribute if there is anything that's not there
to the main poweremail code which is open to everybody to edit. (
https://code.launchpad.net/~openerp-commiter/poweremail/poweremailtrunk)

I wish you spend your resources and time on playing the fair editor of an
opensource project. Not Micro$oft of the opensource world. I may not waste
my time on fighting legally or morally for the sake of poweremail again, but
be sure that community members will also soon realise that contributing to
openerp is waste of time. Who knows if their work will be duplicated by the
editor in the next release. You discourage contribution to openerp and I
speculate the intention of open ERP SA in holding the copyright of the code
whatever they need integrated into the core.

When I conclude this mail, I am not sure if I will ever get a reply for this
mail from 'Open ERP SA'. But please remember that the more you do this, the
more the community moves away from you.

Wish you good luck plagiarising!

and a simple advice to your Indian team doing all the duplication work:
Atleast show the quality of code poweremail has in your duplicated work. I
can already see several logical foolishnes in your code and absolute '0' in
code quality. Atleast try making something better with all the TODO's that
has been left in the code.

Thanks,
-- 
Sharoon Thomas
Business Analyst & Open Source ERP Consultant
CEO @ http://openlabs.co.in

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