A lightning talk given at "OSS Drink Up — the reality of contributing to OSS and earning from it", held at Engineer Cafe on 14 March 2024. These slides are in Japanese. It approaches the question of making a living from OSS through the concrete case of Odoo.
The talk is about practice: how a very small IT services firm makes this work commercially.
What the deck covers
- What Odoo is — the most popular open source business application suite, highly extensible, broad in scope, and used by 12 million people
- Odoo's growth cycle, and the leverage open source provides within it
- How the open core model is structured — the free Community edition, the paid Enterprise edition, and the OCA module set as a third layer
- OCA by the numbers — 1,355 members, 231 repositories, and 5,458 modules as of February 2024
- Low-layer versus high-layer OSS — the former, like the Linux kernel and PostgreSQL, addresses technical problems and is funded by large technology companies; the latter, like Odoo and WordPress, addresses business problems and is funded by industry bodies, user companies, and consultancies
- How to compete in high-layer OSS — build OSS work into marketing, delivery, staff development, and your own internal systems, and do not sign away copyright in client contracts
- Whether it is safe to publish your know-how — the community helps back, market awareness rises, information asymmetry eases, and the ecosystem grows into somewhere proprietary-minded competitors cannot follow
- Quartile's work with Odoo, and the correlation between OSS involvement and service quality
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