openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Sharoon Thomas <sharoonthomas@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Fabien,

Well, now that you have personally mentioned my name, I am required to clarify our (me and Openlabs) stand on your remarks.

On Jul 28, 2011, at 1:12 PM, Fabien Pinckaers wrote:

> 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.

I presume, you must have included me in "tryton guys" from the known definition of the term (if not please feel free to). Please don't create FUD that OpenERP has no issues and all issues being talked about are creations of Tryton and its community. The only "FUD" we do is remind some users who express their frustration about bugs in openerp (which you probably consider features) that there is an alternative which does not have the issue, or learn that its an issue, check if it exists in tryton and fix them. The latter somehow happens faster in our little community because no one is afraid of taking community contributions or their copyrights because neither the project leaders, nor the community has any bad intentions. You may refer to our public repositories [1] to see the authors in each commit. You could also check the tryton contribution guidelines [2] if you call this also FUD.

So please don't get frustrated and annoyed with not being able to accomplish the same, because you are busy abusing the wonderful community which existed around OpenERP (from which some free software believers  are moving to Tryton). You are just doing to the community what you did to me an year ago which u said was FUD again.

I am thankful that an alternative with a slight learning curve existed which was tryton. Had that not been the case, I probably would have just looked for something else. Maybe explaining "why" would make it clear for you.

1. Co-ordination cost of contributing (time spent to get something into your locked repositories) was too high while its much easier in Tryton.
2. A proper project organization [3]
3. Stress on code quality and being pythonic (not unlearning python [4]).
4. Stress on testing 
5. Your dictatorship on certain ideas like the use of decimals where everybody else's collective wisdom was disapproved
and many more…

Many of the above have been requests not just from me, but many active contributors. Dr. Ferdinand and few of us together made a coding guideline and you threw it into the ditch. All these were very difficult to understand at the time, but makes more sense now - You just wanted to retain the copyright of the whole code, documentation and what not so that you could selfishly deal with OpenERP the way you want.

So please don't ever say again that people use tryton because "some activists are motivated by something else", above are my valid reasons for moving to Tryton. If someday OpenERP gets at least some of these issues resolved, I will contribute to OpenERP, till then I am happy with the work we have at Openlabs of fixing the numerous OpenERP implementations you and your partners leave unfinished. 


> 
> 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

This confusion was another major factor for us joining the tryton project for our mainstream development. Most of your partners (not all, I have absolute respect for several wonderful partners who have made their amazing contributions), mostly the new ones were just under-trained sales guys who just threw themselves at ultra low rates into projects which they never understood and later screwed up. And you were happy promoting them into Gold and Silver just because they paid you some extra dollars, while all they did was screw implementations with code developed by the community and throw unfair competition with the same community which was busy developing new and more features for OpenERP. In-fact from Raphael's mail it is evident that you still do the same thing. 

> 
> 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

AFAIK the only "open" is in the project name - OpenERP
- You contradict yourself when you say "community and collaborative" - I thought OpenERP SA claimed that it owned copyright of OpenERP itself and bundled add ons ? Did no one collaborate or are you scared of your entire community that you don't "want to have their copyrights" ? somewhere down in the mail, you have mentioned that you are "afraid to give a copyright to that kind of people that could lock OpenERP in the future" ? Does not a single person in the 380 partners + 500 devs + 4000 ppl qualify ? what a shame ? You might want to have a look at Tryton [3]
- The open source involvement of everybody except OpenERP SA seems to be true. You are more like a dictator who sets rules and then violates them yourself. For example you make a license and violate it yourself. You make promises and you deny them.
- Happy customers - yeh right - at least 3 of the projects from your exhaustive list of references [5]  are projects which abandoned OpenERP (Thanks to your awesome partners).

> 
> 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 open source mission statement promises better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in (Wikipedia). OpenERP neither has quality nor reliability. And about lower costs, I am afraid that won't be true for long if you spend millions because nobody spends without ROI (unless its charity). It is more important to think why and where you had to spend so much than the "effort" involved. You started a whole new projects like the web client with no discussions with the community. Similar to how you made raphael create all expert mailing lists and OpenERP SA doesn't take part in them. This is what contributes to your costs while every other open source project seems to tap on it to reduce costs. If you still want to take the cost of developing everything yourself and not accept community patches (to retain your copyrights) - you might end up spending more. Why is it that OpenERP still cannot tap the potential of its great community ? A similar example is the NaNtics Koo client, which was so much better and stable, while your developers where still trying to figure out how to display dates according to locale.

> 
> 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
Yeh! I saw that - the oracle logo and how "When combined with Sun's MySQL database OpenERP is cost effective" [6] Would you be so kind to show us how this could be done ? Is it one of your hidden modules or does the trunk version do this ? We would be glad to reduce costs for a couple of customers :P 
>  - 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.

Even if you don't do any of the above, please stop bluffing your community and that would be good enough. It was you who said that you wouldn't double license, and then you changed your own words. If it was a mistake, show the boldness to say you were wrong. I can completely understand if you say "OpenERP SA is a for profit venture, we have to make money and hence we are looking at alternate strategies", but bull***ing the community about a semi proprietary license (which does not even seem legal) which you could use to your own advantage is total nonsense. 

> 
> I saw so much good contributors going not open when starting to talk about money (axelor, sharoon, pragtech, ...) 

I speak for myself and Openlabs [8] here

1. I guess you still haven't read this GPL FAQ entry [7] while you were searching for all your loopholes to make your exception license. GPL allows you to "SELL COPIES" and we are doing just that. 
2. Why do you freak out every time you see someone other than openerp SA and its partners sell their services and OpenERP related products ? 
3. We made a UPS integration module [9], sold copies under GPL and on recovering our target, released it "free as in free beer" all the while we were selling it, it was under GPL "free as in freedom". You once said that such shared funding development never works, and it never worked for you because you were greedily selling it for years telling you never recovered the costs. (FYI: In-fact most of the customers of the UPS module were your own partners, figure it out with them...). 

> 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. 

I simply don't understand why you have two stands when it comes to making money - 
1. You have your proprietary migration scripts for an AGPL software which you have not published yet and you make "money" from it ? I am keen to understand why this is "right" while we are wrong. Is it because you had an "exception" fabricated for yourself or is it because they were not "good contributions". 
2. Also your website talks about an OpenID module and you seem to be hiding the code in your internal launchpad repository [10]. Which customer's competitiveness is lost if that is also covered by your so called AGPL exception ?

Why is it fair when you do it with all the lying and denying, while wrong when we just do something which is legal, compliant with GPL and standing by it? 
And if you still don't understand that free stands for the "4 freedoms (0 to 3)"[11] (which each of our customers get when they buy software from us), I can simplify it to "we will continue to develop GPL and AGPL modules and continue to sell them. Fell free to sue us (address below [12]) if you think its illegal, otherwise stop creating "FUD" around the same. "

You should definitely be scared of my copyrights as I will NOT ALLOW MY OPEN SOURCE CODE to be used in a LOCKED SERVICE and the only company I know will do that is OpenERP SA. It is very unfortunate that you have more than 7 certified modules with my copyright (if you haven't removed them already).


> So I think the contributor agreement is important for the future. (or the public domain which is the solution I prefer for simplicity)

hmm, good joke about simplicity! 
+1 for a contributor agreement which makes sense

> 
> 
> 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.
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In short, OpenERP was a great project and could still be a great project with a good leader. 
Fabien™ 0.2 (or is it 6.0) seems corrupt , buggy and has significant memory leaks [13]. OpenERP SA ® 0.2 seems to have rounding issues with anything and everything from licenses to copyrights [14]. 
Please revert or some people might upgrade to tryton . 


Thanks,

Sharoon Thomas
Software Architect and CEO
Openlabs 

P.S: The tryton community occasionally does enjoys OpenERP sponsored entertainment like "open-closed IRC meetings", "deprecated feature requests",  "arithmetic classes [13]". 

[1] http://hg.tryton.org/
[2] http://code.google.com/p/tryton/wiki/HowtoContribute
[3] http://code.google.com/p/tryton/wiki/ProjectOrganization
[4] http://twitter.com/#!/_v1nc3nt_/status/85993290616406016
[5] http://www.openerp.com/products/new-references
[6] http://bias.com.mx/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=8&Itemid=12
[7] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney
[8] http://www.openlabs.co.in
[9] http://www.openlabs.co.in/article/open-erp-integration-ups
[10] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~openerp/openerp/openerp-odoo/view/head:/bzr_set.py#L45
[11] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[12] http://www.openlabs.co.in/article/noida#fragment-2
[13] http://www.openerp.com/forum/topic20469.html
[14] https://lists.launchpad.net/openerp-expert-accounting/msg00070.html