Why Take Part in Odoo's Open Source Community (Part 1: The Why)

Used at an Odoo Open Talk in June 2024. These slides are in Japanese. Before telling anyone to contribute, the deck explains how the Odoo ecosystem actually turns and why it needs more participants right now.

This session is about background and reasoning rather than procedure.

What the deck covers

• Odoo's history and licence changes — from TinyERP to OpenERP to Odoo, through GPL and AGPL, and the move to an LGPL-plus-proprietary open core model in October 2015
• Why the shift to open core happened — under AGPL the vendor struggled to secure revenue and had to lean on selling services
• How the licences differ — LGPLv3 lets proprietary features sit on top; AGPLv3 extends to dependent code and requires source to be obtainable
• Odoo's growth cycle — product improvement, user base, monetisation, and reinvestment, with open source acting as the leverage
• Who is in the ecosystem — Odoo S.A., partners, other service providers, OSS contributors, and users, and how each connects
• How Odoo's focus changed — after the open core shift, the sales side of the business inevitably grew louder
• The present concern — many market-facing staff and partners appear indifferent to the OSS ecosystem, and newly joining partners do not take part in it
• The worst case for users — roughly 60% of user requirements can be met with existing OCA modules, so if that ecosystem dies the answer reverts to bespoke proprietary development
• Reasons to take part, set against the reasons people give for not taking part
• What anyone can do first — use a community module, tell your users you are using it, and write about it publicly

Related links

• Odoo Community Association (OCA) official site
• OCA repositories on GitHub