Hey! As a Odoo dev, it’s really cool to see Odoo mentioned here. I was thinking the same thing regarding its similarities. I’ve always regarded Odoo as the “batteries included” ERP framework.
Here in Australia, Odoo is finally starting to hit some strides. We’re seeing more jobs in the market requesting Odoo experience, at our work we’re onboarding more customers than we have before. All said, I’m definitely going to fire up OpenKoda and brush up on my Java :)
Odoo's quest for monetization from open source has been a bit off-putting. I stopped using it a few quarters back due to that. Community and Enterprise are becoming too disjointed.
I can't speak specifically for Odoo's quest for monetization because I'm not a user; it very well may not be a healthy one. But in general I think FOSS monetization should be celebrated. Successful open source software businesses are generally good for everyone except for closed source software businesses.
Is there something in particular that's flawed with Odoo's business?
You are correct that monetization need to celebrated in OSS software. This being said, when your open-source version is but a shadow version of the enterprise version, then you're doing something wrong. That's what op was hinting at.
I'd add if you want people to use and promote your software, you also want to make sure the documentation is usable.
Though regarding Odoo, I would say the situation is somehow better in this regard than it used to be a 5~7 years ago.
Developers livings as monks and coding away in a dark delapidated castle surviving on their 4 donated cups of coffee a month while addressing 43,000 GitHub issues a month created by enterprise users who are working on commodifying the FOSS product into their cloud solution.
I'm not sure how you are measuring "size", but I was going on features.
Though I haven't done a formal review of which features are open and closed, and the xompany doesn't appear to document it anywhere, so I may be wrong. It seems like when I have looked into it in the past mostly it is a core framework with a few open source apps and whole bucnh of closed ones and the marketing doesn't clearly state what is open and closed.
If you expect every comment on this site to be backed by a massive amount of reasearch, then you are in the wrong place. I have looked into Odoo several times, I was expressing my impressions of the product. Sorry if that wasn't clear in my initial comment.
Assuming you are apart of the team, I'm sure you know Odoo is 20 years old. So, I can't see why in time there couldn't be real competition.
OpenKoda and Odoo actually have sparked interesting questions for me about what an Open source ERP market would look like.
One conclusion I came to is as opposed to vendor lock-in as most ERP/CRM products try to enforce, it would actually be better to go the opposite direction (high compatibility with existing alternatives).
That said, have you guys considered allowing imports from Odoo into OpenKoda or other deep integrations?
In theory, I feel like you can run Odoo apps in OpenKoda, or even vice versa. The experience would be suboptimal but being split between two ERP systems is too.
We meet a lot of companies who are not happy with software solutions which are hard to modify.
It's not even about the cost, but about the limitations and poor development velocity.
These companies strive to build something innovative, they just find these closed platforms really cumbersome and slow to deliver.
When you start investing millions of dollars into a bespoke solution you really want to truly own it at some point. And this is impossible with closed and proprietary application platforms.
Odoo is doing quite well. It made Fabien Panckaers the youngest billionaire in Belgium.