Re: [Openerp-community] Towards a contributor agreement for OpenERP

2011-07-28 Thread Sharoon Thomas
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 co

Re: [Openerp-community] Towards a contributor agreement for OpenERP

2011-07-28 Thread Albert Cervera i Areny
A Dijous, 28 de juliol de 2011 19:12:29, Fabien Pinckaers va escriure:
> 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.

Can't talk for others but this is not our case. We looked for an alternative 
when we saw we could not have a solution for our problems in OpenERP. There 
are several reasons but here are two of them:

- The migration policy: it's not open.
- The censorship in the partner's mailing list were risen by myself when I 
discovered it by chance, otherwise noone would know that some messages were 
being discarded without even notifying the authors.

These are plain facts. Nobody is throwing FUD on them. They are OpenERP SA 
decisions. You're free to do them, the same way we're free to move away. But 
telling the community we're moving away because of members of the Tryton 
community is simply not true. We feel luky Tryton exists, we hope things will 
move forward and the Foundation will help in that, but if it didn't we would 
have to move to something else. Tryton is the consequence, not the cause.

> 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.

This "they want to fuck us with no real reason" is nonsense, at least if you 
include NaN in this. We've invested a lot into OpenERP and the decision was 
not an easy one, so thinking that the only motivation is "by something else" 
sounds like paranoia to me or simply FUD. You know the reasons why we are 
making the move, everyone is free to decide and so you are to ignore them.

> 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 fully agree with you in this. When starting to talk about money some have 
tried to create closed developments, web interfaces or plugins for other 
applications. Even some have created a closed migration process! You're 
absolutely right: "we should be 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. 

Mmmm... did I mention that somebody created a closed migration process?

-- 
Albert Cervera i Areny
http://www.NaN-tic.com
Tel: +34 93 553 18 03



http://twitter.com/albertnan 
http://www.nan-tic.com/blog
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Re: [Openerp-community] Towards a contributor agreement for OpenERP

2011-07-28 Thread Fabien Pinckaers
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

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Re: [Openerp-community] Towards a contributor agreement for OpenERP

2011-07-28 Thread Leonardo Pistone
Fabien,

I think there are two sides on this discussion:

- 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.

That said, we're working on OpenERP towards our common goal to conquer the 
world.

Best,

Leo

On 28 Jul 2011, at 19:12, 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.
> 
> 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.

Re: [Openerp-community] Towards a contributor agreement for OpenERP

2011-07-28 Thread Fabien Pinckaers
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 mista

Re: [Openerp-community] Towards a contributor agreement for OpenERP

2011-07-28 Thread Davide Corio

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 >


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
 - 
http://www.agilebg.com - http://www.domsense.com

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