In a World Where the Point of Community Work Gets Harder to See

A while back I fired off a string of tweets; I am copying them over here.

Something I have been feeling for a while now. It is the kind of thing that either lands with you or does not at all. Over the past few years Odoo has evolved rapidly, both as a product and as a company. That is welcome in itself, but the flip side is that the point of taking part in community work has become harder to see.

When Odoo was still small and immature, there were countless situations where we had no choice but to make up the shortfall ourselves. Or rather, it was nothing but those situations. In that state of affairs, building solutions together in the community had a rationale anyone could see.

And contributing in the community translated fairly readily into recognition in the market. As the product matures and Odoo S.A. puts out more of its own messaging — especially from the business side — community work becomes relatively harder to see. Against that, will players emerge who mean to take up community work from here?

Judging by the current trend, I have no sense at all that they will in Japan. Can Odoo's ecosystem really grow and sustain itself over the long term like this? Odoo S.A. elevates the partners who sell more Enterprise licences. That much has been so for a long time.

What has changed is Odoo S.A.'s influence over the market. As that grows, the right business strategy for a partner is, more than before, to ride on Odoo S.A.'s "direction". In other words, selling plenty of licences and becoming a Silver or Gold Partner can become a large part of a firm's own branding.

But the user's point of view is missing here. The Gold and Silver ranks in Odoo's partner program are in practice decided by how many licences a firm sold within a given period, and they are in no way a guarantee of service quality. Saying this makes me unpopular with people at Odoo S.A., but it is so.

So as a user you would do well to be wary of a partner that holds its own rank up like a banner. The genuinely good integrators do not put it front and centre, because they know that from the user's point of view a partner rank rests on an incomplete KPI.

Ten years into working with Odoo, my conviction that community work is indispensable if you want to give users better service has only grown stronger. Reaching the collective wisdom of the community through the OCA is a considerable advantage, and doing things that diverge from the OCA's way ends up costing more.

When there is a defect in Odoo itself, the fix belongs in the GitHub repository or in Transifex; and when the standard features cannot cover a situation, looking for a solution within the community is, from the user's point of view, generally the most reasonable path.

An implementation built without community review or maintenance support tends to end up home-grown, with maintenance problems to match. Every project I have taken over from another firm has been like that, and so were my own older ones, looking back. You feel this in your bones once you have been through a few version upgrades.

So why do so many Odoo partners build solutions in a space closed to themselves rather than taking part in community work? I think it comes down to one of two things: either the user's point of view is missing (or not prioritised), or the requirements for taking part — technical and linguistic — cannot be met.

On the first, for firms that have made their living carrying proprietary products rather than open-source ones, this is unfortunately normal. Partners whose reason for starting with Odoo leans more towards "it looks sellable" than "it is open source" are almost all in this pattern.

And even where such a partner comes to notice the user's point of view and tries to take part in community work, there is a real learning cost. Given the soil of Japan's IT services industry, players who get over that and take up community work are unlikely to emerge.

Even a partner that takes no part in community work at all still makes use of its results. At Quartile, for instance, we recommend looking at OCA modules first whenever a feature is needed, and that is a practice many Odoo partners adopt to a greater or lesser degree.

But most partners only use OCA modules; they take no part in improving or maintaining them. In short, they free-ride. Users doing so is of course welcome, but a firm earning revenue from OCA modules while taking no part in community work — is that really acceptable?

Between a firm that has built community work up over time and one that merely free-rides, a clear difference in capability shows. Being able to drive a car does not make someone able to build one or repair one. That difference is hard to see unless you are watching for it as a user. It is an area where information asymmetry comes about easily.

So even within the same bracket of "Odoo partner", the firms that take part in community work and the firms that do not are as different as oil and water. In principle the former should deliver the higher service quality. But the former, precisely because of that capability, are also the firms that can deliver a proper service on the Community Edition without leaning on Odoo Enterprise.

Which means that under Odoo S.A.'s current scheme for rating partners the latter are more readily rewarded than the former, which in a sense comes out backwards from the user's point of view. On this point I cannot avoid saying that the scheme has ended up reinforcing information asymmetry.

So looking at the recent trend, I feel we ought to be putting more out there, to promote community work and make it better known. My worry is that left alone, community work will be buried further and further. Would that not mean the slow death of an open-source product and its ecosystem?

Even so, Odoo may well go on succeeding as a product for some time. But if community work shrivels and distorted information circulates in the market, it is users who pay for it. In the long run it will blunt Odoo's competitiveness too. Probably in ways nobody sees.

This is not a situation that Odoo S.A.'s marketing people or account managers can do anything about, and probably almost nobody there sees a problem in it. Everyone is working flat out in their own patch. The numbers are growing. There is no occasion to see a problem.

If anything, it would be no surprise if there were people on the business side who keep community work at arm's length. Handy open-source features, especially ones that overlap with Enterprise features, relatively weaken the pull of Enterprise. Community features are built to complement Odoo itself, but locally a conflict of interest does arise.

That is exactly why I think we need the ecosystem talked about from a wider view, with the principles behind it getting through — and yet the messages that come out of Odoo S.A. often feel thin to me. It is because the open-source side of community work is left to one side even when the word "ecosystem" is used.

This feel for the situation is probably not available to anyone who has not bet on community work, whether for survival or in pursuit of an ideal. I do wish Odoo S.A. would revisit how it faces the open-source ecosystem at management level, but short of some major incident that scenario looks unlikely.

So I have come to think there is nothing for it but to put things out there myself, however little weight I carry, in a direction that encourages community work. I know my view is not the mainstream one. There are surely "tastier" ways to do business. But that is not what I started the company for. The question is what culture we can build.

Incidentally, the centre of the OCA's community work is Europe, and Spain in particular is extremely active. I think that owes a great deal to the soil for community work having been laid before Odoo S.A. "succeeded" with Enterprise. Japan, unfortunately, does not have that. Well then — we shall see. We check the answers in a few years.

The original tweet:

Something I have been feeling for a while now. It is the kind of thing that either lands with you or does not at all. Over the past few years Odoo has evolved rapidly, both as a product and as a company. That is welcome in itself, but the flip side is that the point of taking part in community work has become harder to see. — Yoshi Tashiro (@yostashiro) November 19, 2023

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash