openerp-community team mailing list archive

["Lionel Sausin, de la part de l'équipe informatique Numérigraphe" <informatique@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Greg Moss, please let me sum it up again.
You're preaching for an obsolete business model that others have already 
tried and failed at.
There are no customers for this here.
You are in a market where programming is the investment, community 
contribution is the advertising, and consulting is the income.
You won't change it because we customers chose it. I suggest you embrace 
it too.
It's a fair market, and it grows every time a customer gets educated.

For us customers, real value is:
- advice, education, customization, expertise: we do pay for those.
- quality: that must be provided by community driven projects. Mind you, 
if that fails, all will fail.
By the way, we could have paid to contribute through a partner, but 
chose to get educated and contribute by ourselves. I expect more and 
more of your customers to do the same.

More detailed answers are inlined below.

Le 11/02/2013 17:24, Greg Moss a écrit :
> (...) I've been working with a team that has been kicking around 
> several ideas for high end modules for vertical markets.
All the proprietary verticals I've seen suck. Salesmen lie when they say 
they can covers all the customer's needs, and then there's no budget to 
bring in real value and the project fails.
Every time.
> (...) So if the code is widely available along with plenty of 
> independent consultants and partners to manage the installs it makes 
> it a very risky model to put a lot of money into developing code for 
> entire industries... ie healthcare.
Ironically, a health vertical solution was the first one to be a success 
using the exact opposite route that you propose - it's become GNU Health 
and they even moved to Tryton, partly to make sure no commercial 
tainting would occur.
> (...)If someone wants to make a free module and give out all the code 
> for free... fine.
Fine but mostly useless as the "extra addons" fiasco shows. Quality code 
is peer-reviewed and generic, free is not enough.
> If they want to try and sell their module without source code. Fine.
No, not fine. The license we all agreed to forbids that. And it's still 
useless for the same reasons as above.
> If they want to sell a module with source code. Fine. If a module is 
> priced too high, it won't sell and will open up competition for others 
> to write better modules. OpenERP SA should set up a market place and 
> take a small cut from the paid module sales.
Fine. Some tried, all failed. Do better if you can, but don't count on us.
> At this point I would be worried less about pulling in programmers who 
> will write for free
It's not "for free" - it's called investing. I suggest you do it too.
> than having barriers for people who can invest in real dollars and 
> larger programming teams not being able to have a viable business 
> model to get investors on board. The more flexible and less rules on 
> how this software can be bundled, sold, and integrated the easier it 
> is to get people writing software for OpenERP.
The only rules at play here are the AGPL, and the rules of free market. 
When the offer is crap it' won't sell, that's all.

Lionel Sausin