Meeting with the ERPNext founder
Early in January Rushabh Mehta, the ERPNext Founder and CEO, wrote an open letter addressing the Odoo community. The OCA board answered to it by inviting Rushabh to a board meeting.
Open source is a core value for the OCA, and the freedom we get from it is an important benefit. Even though ERPNext overlaps with the scope of Odoo and its community, the OCA still sees it as a valuable effort, given its open source nature. Rather than focusing on the competition between both platforms, the OCA prefers looking for the synergies that both communities might achieve.
Both frameworks are technically quite different, so it's not likely that much code can be shared across them. The exception could be some common supporting libraries, powering the equivalent features in both products. Gantt charts could be such an example.
Still, there is an opportunity to trade experience between the two communities. At the organization level, ERPs face the challenge posed by the many local requirements specific to each country. We could benefit from learning about the organization and collaboration strategies set up by both organizations to cope with this complexity.
Functional designs is also an important area for ERPS and business applications. There is potential to create a wider collaboration between both communities to share the design of business features and conceptual solutions for problems that are hard to tackle.As a result from our meeting, we agreed on opening our communication channels for both communities, to start discussions on any of these topics:
- The OCA community is welcome to post at the ERPNext discussion forum, for any queries where the ERPNExt community might be of help.
- The ERPNext community members are also welcome to post queries on the OCA mailing lists. The best mailing list to use depends on the topic. The list is at: https://odoo-community.org/groups. If in doubt, the Contributors ML can always be used. We will surely welcom and help, whatever the ML they choose.
You can read Rushabh's post reporting his views on this meeting. We hope that fruitful collaboration can happen between people from both communities, and that in the end open source software will become stronger than before.
