Hello, I am very glad for this thread, because I was going to start a very similar one myself. Please excuse me that this email has become longer than I expected.
I am in a very similar position to Hassan. Please allow me a short introduction of myself: - I was following TinyERP / OpenERP development from about 2005. This basically means that I played with most major releases for a few days, but back then I did not have an immediate need for an ERP. Now, we are planning to implement an ERP in our company, and OpenERP is one of our main candidates. - I also followed and tried other open-source ERP software like Compiere, ADempiere (was enjoying the famous forking debate in real time on their forums) and OpenBravo. I also checked out Apache OfBiz, which seems to be more like a framework to build on, not a complete ERP package that you can take and customize -- although I realize that the barrier between customization and building on something can be fuzzy. - During my 10 years as an IT professional I was working as a developer, architect and project manager. I worked on embedded systems (e.g. proprietary mobile phone software, Android system development and porting to new platforms) and as the lead architect of multiple enterprise applications, like a CRM system for a specific market. Based on my experience and what I read on the various public forums related to OpenERP, my main concerns regarding OpenERP are the following: 1. Lack of public roadmap driven by the community: Right now, not even the OpenERP partners know exactly what is planned for the next major release, how will that be implemented... etc. This is very important information, because based on this you can decide, whether you can start your ERP implementation based on v7, or trunk. You would choose trunk, if you know that there is a feature being developed on it, that you would have to develop yourself for v7, and that trunk will become the stable vXY in time for your ERP implementation. 2. Data migration between releases: I still can't really wrap my head around how can one release an enterprise application without proper migration support between releases. On our enterprise software projects I don't allow commits that change the DB schema and don't have a DB migration solution from the previous version(s). This migration not only includes the creation of the missing tables, columns ... etc. in the database, but also the semantic transformation of the already existing data. Not doing this, when you write the actual database change is very similar to not code your automated tests when you do a change: it is much more expensive to do it later. I understand that there is a paid service offered by OpenERP AS to migrate existing databases. But it is a closed source process, which is very hard to audit. And we all know that any ERP application is worthless without the data in it. It is also kind of a vendor lock-in, because even if you work with a different OpenERP partner, they can only do the migration either by subcontracting OpenERP AS or by using/improving the community migration scripts, which are still lagging behind for v7 even months after its release. 3. An alarming lack of consensus on the more technical aspects of OpenERP between OpenERP AS and the partners, most recently demonstrated by the contact_id - partner_id issue, which seems to be resulting in 2 incompatible branches of v7: one maintained by OpenERP AS and the other by the partners. I also have to say that based on my experience with both enterprise applications and also software development in general, the solution proposed by the partners is the better one. The problem is, that if you don't want to be "locked in" in the v7 community branches, you also have to start maintaining separate trunk branches to make sure: - to have an upgrade path to trunk and later stable branches at all times - it is possible to merge this branch back to trunk if and when OpenERP SA can be convinced that this branch has the better solution, e.g. based on the number of actual OpenERP customers choosing this branch instead of the official ones. We live in an imperfect world, and if OpenERP had only one of these issues, then I would not write this email at all --- we would be already working on our ERP implementation based on it. But these issues combined make me worry whether OpenERP is the right decision. Obviously, if we go for OpenERP, we will act like good citizens of the community by contributing back our own changes (we will have to do some significant changes around the project and hr modules to support our use cases). We will probably contract with one or more partners to do some of the work, but we will also have to build up internal development and operations capabilities because an ERP affects almost all aspects of a company and one of the reason going with open-source is to avoid vendor and service provider lock-in. I am very interested in how you see these issues: both OpenERP SA and the partners, people already using OpenERP in production, and people still in the evaluation phase. Thank you and Best Regards, Gergely 2013/4/20 Stefan Rijnhart <[email protected]> > On 20-04-13 16:42, Stefan Rijnhart wrote: > >> OpenERP is still governed by a single commercial entity and no other >> party has access to the official branches. >> > > In so far as that was not clear from the rest of my post, I meant to say > 'no other party has *write* access to the official branches'. > > > -- Kis Gergely ügyvezető / CEO MattaKis Consulting Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.mattakis.com Phone: +36 70 408 1723 Fax: +36 27 998 622
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