Navigating High-Layer OSS — Building a Business on Open Source ERP

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

Related links

• Blog post: can we grow the number of players in high-layer OSS?
• OSS Drink Up event page