I’m surprised that there are so few comments on this thread. When you first posted back in October, over a dozen people, and most were regular committers, had a great deal of interest.
I read the list and I constantly hear comments about attracting more users. I know that a lot of the contributors feel that if they provide a solid framework, they can make a living (and rightly so) out of customization and extending OFBiz to meet their clients’ needs but this tends to be larger organizations. My point of view says that if you have an accounting package as proposed, you would attract many small businesses. They would have a fully functioning accounting app that meets most of their needs for the present but as they grow, they would have the whole OFBiz framework to grow into. I can only go off of my experience. QuickBooks was one of very few options at the time when I started my business. I knew nothing of open source and chose a relatively cheap option at the time. Then I built a website. There were only a few orders a month so processing orders using my online system and then entering in QB was not a problem for my one man outfit. Then came the time when I needed to add staff and then I needed a payroll feature. Of course this is a subscription but no big deal. Then there was my accountant. Me having to send a CD back and forth and then merging any changes the accountant made. She had no direct access that OFBiz would give. As the company grew, I grew out of QB but to my surprise, Intuit have made it very difficult to get any meaningful data out of QB. So instead of going to another package, I just upgraded yet again to QB Enterprise. What’s my point in this little saga? Well, I guess what I am trying to say is that I think an EZBiz addition would attract more small business. Devs would not get rich overnight but I believe that in one or two years, some of those small businesses turn into medium sized business. They are already using OFBiz so why not just extend it? I think the devs would get more work than they currently have because there would be so many more businesses using the product and instead of huge one off customizations, you would have many, many small businesses extending the basic EZBiz and starting to use the entire OFBiz framework. Imagine the enhancements to the project along the way. Anyway, that’s my couple of cents worth and so I ask, if there is interest in this how do we move it forward from here and not just see the idea waste away? -- View this message in context: http://n4.nabble.com/EZBiz-tp1589812p1591706.html Sent from the OFBiz - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
