openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Fabien Pinckaers <fp@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

It's a pity that some lost their trust on OpenERP, especially because these fears and doubts have been highly motivated by tryton guys that tried to create frustrations, unfair critics and war against OpenERP. We used to never answer to these unfair attacks as creating a war and motivate people by frustrations is not the way I see an open community. It is not sane.

So, guys, don't be confused by what's being said; some activists are motivated by something else than creating a strong product and community on OpenERP. We always hear the same people criticising, they do not represent the community.

Here is who is the OpenERP community:
  - 380 partners
  - 500 developers on launchad (3500 branches)
  - 4000 people that posted on the forum the past 3 months
  - customers taht trust in us

As I used to say, OpenERP is a great project and this should not change:
  - most of us are paid to have fun on something we like
  - the community is great and collaborative efforts on launchpad works efficiently
  - partners are good and play the open source rules
  - the open source involvment of everyone is true
  - customers are verry happy of the product and partner's services

What ever you may have read, the open philosophy of OpenERP never changed. We are fully dedicated to:
  - open source
  - the community
  - the partner network
I did expensed ~2M€ on that area in the past 18 months (1.2M€ in agpl developments, 200k€ on community contrib management on launchpad, 600k€ on recruiting and helping partners to develop themselves) do you really think we did that to kill those efforts now ?

The challenge is very big. And, due to community, partners and OpenERP collaborative efforts, we are by far the only one that succeeded to:
  - build a strong, big, and active community of thousands of people
  - create a product that overpass and compete with proprietary softwares in most aspects
  - avoid having contributions that are proprietary modules
  - develop a brand that has a visibility comparable to proprietary softwares
  - develop a partner network to deliver service to compete on the market
  - develop a sustainable business model where partners and openerp are profitable
  - proove the system with strong customers refences and thousands of customers in production
  - build a big base of hundreds of modules to cover most company needs

The past prooved us that our strategy was the right one: all others open source ERPs failed to get more than 2 of these points ! They even don't imagine how complex it is to achieve these steps to the success.

But we should not forget that this is only the beginning. To succeed in this highly competitive market, we need to be able to evolve very quickly to not be deprecated in two years:
  - today, if you are not web based, you are nothing. tomorrow you will need to be mobile
  - today, if you need 40 days to integrate accounting, you are nothing
  - today, if you a not out-of-the-box you are nothing

Fortunatelly, our eco-system is strong. We are now organized to face this:
  - we have a strong r&d team
  - partners are active in 67 countries
  - the community is very dynamic (3500 branches on lp !!!)
So, we need everyone to collaborate, share, discuss and promote the software to discuss.


Now, I understand that some people may have fears or doubt according to everything that have been said. To improve this, I am ready to make any move that can enforce this position:
  - guarantee the open source nature of openerp in the future
  - improve the win-win relationship between partners, openerp, and the community
  - with no negative impact on revenues (of partners or openerp) as this is what sustain the growth of the open source product.

I saw so much good contributors going not open when starting to talk about money (axelor, sharoon, pragtech, ...) That's why I am afraid to give a copyright to that kind of people that could lock OpenERP in the future.  I don't trust everyone, but i trust myself. OpenERP already prooved that it's not our case. So I think the contributor agreement is important for the future. (or the public domain which is the solution I prefer for simplicity)



In order to satisfy your fears, we can investigate the solution of raphael:

we can put a clause on the contributor agreement: if one day, something developed by openerp is not open source (under one of the gnu licenses) the copyright goes back to the community. I do not know the legal impact of such a thing but it's clearly in phase with what we want to do with OpenERP.

If it's legaly possible, this is something I like as it could satisfy everyone and avoid more misunderstanding with OpenERP.

This could be great as I can die while knowing that the open nature of OpenERP is guaranteed in the future :) 


-- 
Fabien

PS: we have been bad in the communication in the past days. don't forget we are a small company with limited resources like most of you. we can do mistake, we will try to improve that.