Re: [Openerp-community] Towards a contributor agreement for OpenERP
Il 28/07/2011 01:59, Ana Juaristi ha scritto: It's really a pity that Nan is moving to Triton and several others are thinking about it. I think OpenERP doesn't know the value is loosing if they let Nan go. It's my opinion. Exactly, i don't care about the stupid war between tryton and openerp, we are all free to use tryton if we don't like openerp sa policies, but what i regret is the loss of some important contributors. OpenERP SA must understand the WE CAN SELL openerp thanks to the extra addons developed by these contributors. For instance, i could not be here without the jasper_report addon made by NaN, cause we cannot spend one week to create an invoice template the standard way. Now i guess we won't have a 6.1 version of jasper_report cause we have lost NaN. THIS IS A BIG PROBLEM As Jan said Developing a ERP system is one thing, implementing an ERP system is a total different thing We need the community, we need external contributors. OpenERP SA is doing a great job, the support is improving rapidly and we can start to see amazing things in the trunk. But this is not enough. Our customers still cannot do accounting with OpenERP cause a lot of standard tools and reports are missing or because of rounding problems. We are losing leads and customers because of this. Could be the end of OpenERP if we lose others great contributors. So i really pray for OpenERP SA to do something. I'm not asking this just as a community member, but also as a partner that won't be able to sell openerp anymore bacause of the lack of features and precious-and-fast community support. On the other side, i ask all the trolls that are posting offensive messages on twitter to stop immediatly. I can say i'm not evaluting Tryton because i'm scared about the behaviour of its community. So i really suggest them to take care about their marketing -- Davide Corio davide.co...@agilebg.com - davide.co...@domsense.com http://www.agilebg.com - http://www.domsense.com ___ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~openerp-community Post to : openerp-community@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~openerp-community More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
Re: [Openerp-community] Towards a contributor agreement for OpenERP
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 rd 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
Re: [Openerp-community] Towards a contributor agreement for OpenERP
Leonardo, - on one side, some people, especially tryton supporters, are behaving in a way I don't agree with. We all make our choices, any of us is free work on OpenERP, Tryton, SAP, OpenBravo, a bakery shop or whatever, but that doesn't entitle us to tweet #openerp #fail and similar FUD as I don't do against all competitors I can think of. As Davide said, that doesn't put Tryton in a good light. If important contributors leave, that's a pity for the project and we should talk, but that has nothing to do with flamewars. - on the other hand, some people are genuinely worried about what can happen of their contributions, many would like more transparency and openness on the mailing lists (asking people to refrain from hard FUD and keep to standard criticism). Also, we were a bit worried seeing you tweet about giving up the licence exception and then updating the website offering it anyway without any further discussion. Yes, may be I should explain this mistake of mine. When I announced this, we found a solution that: - is compatible with AGPL - while NOT being a dual licence - allows customer to not redistribute what they do like in GPL - Here is part of an internal email at that time -- Have a look at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html, section 7. The AGPL accepts to put Additional permissions in the licence: Additional permissions are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions. You can put Additional permissions only if it can be reLicenced under the terms of the AGPL: If a license document contains a further restriction but permits relicensing or conveying under this License, you may add to a covered work material governed by the terms of that license document, provided that the further restriction does not survive such relicensing or conveying. So, the AGPL accepts that we add an additional permission as allowed by the section 7, only if this permission can be removed by anyone that has the code. So we could have added an additional permission Private Use in the AGPL. The customer is in his rights to relicence under AGPL but he will not do it. Everyone is happy, OpenERP remains 100% AGPL. This is exactly what we need. We incorporate this in the software itself, so that we don't have to ship a second version of the software. Moreover, it forbids anyone to create a business reselling modules as the first one that buys the software is in his right to redistribute for free. It seems to be the solution we are looking for: - similar to a GPL for 'private use' customers - AGPL for everyone In order to do things cleanly, we contacted the FSF to get their vision on this. It tooks some weeks as they seems as overloaded as us. Even if it seems ok with the AGPL, we came to the conclusion that it's more transparent to create two different licences to avoid discussions and trolls on the validity of such an additional permission. The FSF proposed to call it AGPL+XXX. Moreover, it allowed people that did not wanted to put under AGPL+additional permission to keep a pure AGPL version on their own module. So, this is why we decided to change our mind and go for a dual licence that fits our requirement. I apologize for this communication mistake. Please note that we tried to discuss this with the community and partners but it became a public flamewar even before having explained the things properly. Usual activists created big FUD around something not clearly explained which was very bad. So we decided to make things very clear before communicating more on this topic. That's why we launched with the FAQ and the communication email to explain everything. It's clear that we did some communication mistakes but it does not change the fact that it's a good move and it does not impact at all our open source commitment. That said, we're working on OpenERP towards our common goal to conquer the world. Yes. We are best developers than marketing guys, let's do what we can do :) -- Fabien Pinckaers CEO OpenERP Chaussée de Namur 40 B-1367 Grand-Rosière Belgium Phone: +32.81.81.37.00 Fax: +32.81.73.35.01 Web: http://openerp.com ___ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~openerp-community Post to : openerp-community@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~openerp-community More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
Re: [Openerp-community] Towards a contributor agreement for OpenERP
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
