On Tuesday October the 4th, in Louvain La Neuve, a collaboration meeting has taken place between:
- Fabien Pinckaers (CEO of Odoo sa),
- Xavier Pansaers (COO of Odoo sa),
- Joël Grand-Guillaume (President of the OCA),
- Maxime Chambreuil (VP of the OCA),
- Eric Caudal (Board Member of the OCA)
to discuss the past and future collaboration between both organizations.
Community Edition: key to Odoo's development
Fabien has presented the company review which is positive: financial situation has drastically improved since last year with a break-even point reached 9 months ago and sales on Odoo Enterprise contract up by 84% since last year. For this reason, the company is now able to auto-finance the R&D and can refocus on product and market development.
The company business model is well balanced between indirect (Partners) and direct sales (mostly SaaS) while the product starts to be mature. In the current sales process, the Community Edition (Freemium) represents the entry point for the Enterprise offer (Premium). This is why having a complementary approach is essential to the premium offer.
Fabien is willing to work on several topics to improve the module organization between the Community and Enterprise edition, on one side, and the collaboration with the community through the OCA on the other one.
A better management of the community
The OCA has been very active to organize the community contributions with now more than 2000 modules, being the organization the biggest contributor of the apps website. At the same time, the OCA has increase the presence in community events (Pycon, etc.) recruiting contributors or building solutions to improve the offer of the community edition.
The relations between the community and the editor have positively evolved since than last year license change.
Fabien has a positive perception of the community and is comfortable with current split of roles of the OCA (Manage the community modules, taking care of the contributors) complementary from Odoo (improve the core, take care of the product).
On the same perspective, the OCA reckons that the editor has demonstrated goodwill toward the community:
- AGPL/LGPL switch has been smooth and the licenses are now displayed in the apps platform
- The functional and technical Documentation have been cleansed and improved
- R&D effort is very positive: multiple innovation are now available in v10
- Fabien has made a continuous effort to consult the community generating a positive feedback
A cooperative effort has been noted where contributors have were the possibility to participate and provide feedback which helps the overall acceptance of the product.
In parallel, the community visibility has been improved in the official website with now an entry "Community" at top level menu in www.odoo.com.
Working together
On the not so positive side, the OCA notes that many question in Github are left unanswered, some of them critical.
- As an experiment, two volunteer contributors (Yenthe and Daniel Reis) have been included in the official Odoo Github management issue to help the triage of the communication.
- Martin Trigaux is now spending half his time coordinating the requests between those 2 contributors and the Odoo developers.
- Yenthe (award of best Odoo contributor 2016) has given a prominent work so far and the experiment, positive for everybody, should be extended by Odoo.
- Resources are overbooked but new recruitments are ongoing with the objective to treat all open PR in a timely manner.
Fabien and the OCA board are willing to increase the current collaboration and work together on hot topics.
- The first one would be the possibility to include the OCA community events along the current roadshow planned for v10. During the events, Odoo would advertise the product and generate business opportunities while the OCA team would talk to the community to recruit contributors.
- Stéphane Bidoul from the OCA has invested many resources to provide a setup tools via pip: discussions and modifications in the Odoo core have been done to make possible Odoo compatible with the OCA process.
- Translation Management: a simplification per country/main language is expected (instead of sub-language) and the OCA would like to be included in the process/workflow.
- The OCA would appreciate a link to the OCA website to be included in the Odoo community page: Fabien will consider the request.
Preparing the future of Odoo
Fabien will communicate on a high level roadmap for v11 during the Odoo Experience days but cannot yet confirm too many details:
1. Python3 migration is planned to be achieved for v11 and communication will be confirmed in the near future.
2. Which features will be in Community/Enterprise?
A cleansing in v11 will redesign the borders between both editions: a rough balance of 80% Community modules and 20% Enterprise is to be maintained in the long run. Some ideas, not final at this stage have been elaborated concerning the community/Enterprise split:
- Harmonize in v11 the web interface to ease the switch between both editions.
- Improve the split between OE/OC: In v9, the Enterprise modules were created by default (all new ones were hosted in Enterprise).
Example: Simple accounting/invoicing would be part of community while more complex features (bank interfaces, reports) would belong to Enterprise. The same will happen for MRP (in community) and QA / PLM (in Enterprise)
3. The OCA asks that a principle should be adopted while maintaining the balance in both editions: not to remove any necessary element between both versions that would create a gap difficult to bridge.
Next steps
A meeting will be held with Stéphane Bidoul and Simon Lejeune to collaborate on the setup tool.
Olivier Dony will be contacted to get answers/solution on the current technical blocking points from the community.
Another meeting with marketing will be organized to find opportunities to share events during the next roadshow for v10.
Odoo
More information about Odoo is available here: https://www.odoo.com
Odoo community Association
The Odoo Community Association, or OCA, is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of Odoo features and promote its widespread use.
The Association provides financial, organizational and legal support to the broader Odoo Open Source community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute to the code, the funding and other resources, with the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit.
More on http://odoo-community.org/.
