I don’t think ERPNext is just a ‘tool class’ project, it has lot of functionality and if you are willing to adopt certain workarounds, you can handle scenarios like scrap etc. This is true of not just ERPNext but any ERP. Every ERP has it’s genesis and for ERPNext it is make to order.
Open source in it’s pure form never starts with the motivation to make money but eventually I think good open source projects end up making money either for themselves or for the community around them or both.
I agree on stability being compromised for adding features sometimes but again the community always wants more features
I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood the meaning of my post in a fundamental way. You’ve written a lot of words here about why you’re right and I’m wrong about this particular thing, but none of it’s important. It’s not important because, at the end of it all, neither your opinion nor my opinion are the ones that count.
That’s why I phrased my response to you as I did. When talking about your earlier statements, I didn’t say that they weren’t (at least from your perspective) factually true; I said they weren’t helpful. That’s an important difference. When people get invested in open source platforms, the particular set of problems they face often feel very urgent. That’s a great thing, in a way, but it often leads to situations where people who don’t write the code tell the people who do what they “must” decide.
That’s not helpful. It’s not a matter of “taking offense”, as you say, but something more fundamental about the nature of open source. It isn’t a democracy. Instead, you vote with what you create.
This whole thread was started on the premise that the project may not be meeting it’s monetary goals.
Open Source projects are usually started because of a love for the topic and the concept (regardless of the projects end goal).
However, when the ‘project’ then starts moaning about not making enough money in the intended revenue streams, the developer team has at that point turned their attention away from ‘the love of the project’ focus and begun to ask hard questions about WHY it doesn’t make enough money.
At that point ALL interest is no longer on what makes the developer happy from a working or contributing perspective. It has now turned the corner on what to do to make money.
If you want to make money, then you MUST take a hard look at the things that are LIMITING your potential to make money.
At that point everything is on the table and sometimes what might seem blunt or harsh, is just the truth that might be missing.
So, yes, my points are helpful as well as others that attempt to look at this from a business perspective and offer their thoughts.
After all, this has now become a business issue, and not a feel good issue and not by my doing, but by the developers new interest.
When the perspective changes, so does the advice needed to succeed.
At the very beginning of this thread, the author tries to paint the monetization of opensource software with a political brush. I refused to bite on the politicization of the topic and instead address the core reasons for the premise of the topic…
Making money with your project.
For example, the author proposes the following:
In this, the author ‘assumes’ that everyone reading has the same progressive concept of how the world works and that capitalism cannot help them find a solution.
The author presumes to imply that:
“You cannot make a living making music.”
Yet there are more millionaires in the music industry than you can count.
“… or art.”
Yet we have thousands of famous architects designing the most beautiful buildings in the world, bringing them to reality and filling them with equally beautiful paintings. photographs, and sculptures from their local populations.
“You can’t even make a living taking care of children.”
Yet there are tens of thousands of very profitable daycare centers around the world. There are even daycare centers for senior citizens that are not only profitable but enriching the lives of the people they serve.
Because of these flawed assumptions, I tended to focus on the facts and realities of making money with a project.
Here the author starts by almost asking the question of “why can’t I make money with this?”
The author then slides into politicizing it with a biased set of assumptions as detailed above.
The CORE of the issues is that the author and the developer team needs to drop the pessimistic, defeatist, progressive attitude in order to focus on the right path to monetizing the project and keep it going. There are business answers to the situation but you have to be open to them.
Everything I have commented on here is about how to get to their money goals. However if you start out the thread with a progressive defeatist tone, then it becomes difficult to properly frame the issue.
when the ‘project’ then starts moaning about not making enough money
I’m sure you have a lot to contribute to these conversations, but when you start writing things like this, I have a very hard time taking your words as intended in good faith. Nobody’s “moaning” here, and I wish you would try to find more constructive ways of making your points.
The dichotomy you’re creating between the developer perspective and the business perspective is a false one. I work with mid-sized companies. That typically means 200-1000 employees, and at least $250M a year in revenue. Maintainer-led open source is very much alive and well in that world. Likewise, when I say that the creators are supposed to make the decisions on design priorities, there’s absolutely nothing idealistic about it. It’s a very well established strategy of governance, and even the corporate boards I’ve reported to (composed of people who have never written a line of code in their lives) increasingly understand that.
The ERPNext maintainers are still in the process of figuring out their long term governance structures, and they’ve still got a lot of work to do on that front. Nobody’s doubting that, I suspect least of all them. Maybe they’ll figure it out, and maybe they won’t. Either way, the jabs and insults don’t help anyone.
Maybe ‘moaning’ was a bit harsh. Remember I am trying to NOT get hooked into the political bias setup in the very first post of the thread.
So I tend to find such politics offensive at the start and would prefer to deal with the actual core problem. So that word choice was me grumbling about the misdirection of the initial premise of the thread.
Your mid-size company model is a good one, but not the only target of the ERPNext application. While a firm with that much revenue does in fact have the IT resources to create anything that might be missing, your smaller companies with fewer than 100 employees are not so fortunate and would benefit from a bit more attention. They would also be critical in establishing higher installed base numbers and they would get you to your goals faster than the fewer numbers of larger installations.
When you are working from a service model (like the Frappe cloud service) as your method of monetizing a project, then the number of smaller installations you can secure will pay higher returns than the single large installation. This is mainly because the ‘user seat’ is highly discounted with higher numbers of employees in a single install.
So it is only logical to focus more on the smaller businesses needs than they have been up to this point.
Again, still all pointing out how to make more money with the project.
Nothing here is intended as “jabs and insults” only a set of GPS waypoints that light a path to meet their vocalized revenue goals (and certainly not the only path).
If the team is in fact still working at “figuring out their long term governance structures” then they may want to get that in place to prevent floundering with revenue streams. With a proper structure in place, they might have a better chance at settling on actions that generate revenue.
@bkm would love if you would invest half of the energy you spend in such writing such posts (which are not useful) on the documentation (which is very useful) Home · frappe/erpnext Wiki · GitHub
I do in fact spend a great deal of time writing user documentation for ERPNext in my own document repositories. They are each tailored to one of my clients businesses that are running ERPNext and include business workflow instructions to help them better use what they have to increase their profits. (I was a process workflow analyzer in a previous occupation and can put that skill set to use to help them optimize most steps in their business even beyond the software usage.)
I lock their software version at install time in order to prevent having to re-educate them about the constantly updates and changes. This means they are using versions 8, 9, or 10. So most of what I write is specific to working around the shortfalls of those versions as they apply to my clients and the custom apps or modifications I had to get developed to fill in the holes.
It is NOT possible to write for the latest releases that would be in the repository you linked above, because everything changes far to fast to keep it up. I am busy just keeping up with the documents for my own clients on the older versions.
In this thread you started the conversation with a flawed premise and now it appears that you are not happy about me shining a light on that fact. So you attack me personally about how I spend my time.
My contributions here have all been about addressing the core of your concerns about putting your project on an increasing revenue path. If you feel that I got any of the facts wrong, then you can address those individually.
You just have no idea how much I love what you have built here. Even through your snarky approach to dealing with subjects you may not like, I still am very appreciative of everything you and your team have accomplished. I even pay my developers to contribute back to the core with PRs when I have a client that is willing to pay for such improvements.
I have been setting up business control software for many years and have been through many systems both open source and proprietary licensed packages. I currently work with ERPNext the most. So when you posted looking for answers about how to generate money with your project, I laid out the cold hard facts about the difficult steps of one possible path the team could take to get there. I also explained the road blocks in personnel and business model that you can expect to get in your way. It is up to you to use the information or disregard it, but certainly you prefer to deny it as being useful.
If that is your prerogative, that is fine as well. But the difference between us is that I USE software to make a living through the services end of the equation very much like the Frappe cloud team is trying to do. I am fairly successful at it and I passed along the hard choices I had to make to get there.
My success is NOT on the 100 to 500 employees installations. It is in the 10 to 50 employee installations that make $1 million to $50 million a years in sales. The companies that cannot afford to have developers and dedicated IT staff to just ‘hand-off’ their problems to and wait for them to get done. These companies are far more profitable for me and my business model than the larger ones. You could have many, many more of them as users if you were paying closer attention to the end user experience instead of haphazardly growing the new domains. What is the point of having 20 different business sectors that each have only partially working modules in ERPNExt if you cannot get end users on the system to stick with it beyond the trial phase?
Sometimes ‘going wide’ only scatters your effort instead of making headway in growth.
So, I am not demanding anything or any part of your time. I am pointing out the things you are missing to meet your stated financial goals as posed by the opening post of the thread. To be specific, you asked the question here. I only offered a path to an answer. I learned a long time ago to put my ‘pride’ aside and pay attention to people making money in the field that I wanted to enter. Otherwise I would be a very poor man.
It’s called “contribution”, creating something of value to the community is how people can be useful to others here. It is the fundamental basis of what happens in open source and we have a community in the first place.
Everyone makes stuff for their “paying” clients. This is not the kind of community that is here. There are multiple reasons you may hate us and keep trolling. But ultimately its what value you add to the community.
If you think you passionate rants are moving us, the core contributors, sorry thats not true. This is exactly the reason why open source contributors worldwide feel burnt out. The “commons” was created with real effort, that was respected.
The difference between you and us is that the documentation we make to our “paying” clients is open.
Here is a challenge (which I am sure you will ignore), will you make your private documentation open to the community here? Share back to the people from who you are learning?
I have only recently become part of the community and I am fortunate to have experience as an accountant, a software developer, business consultant and also a business owner. So I can understand and relate to what @bkm and @rmehta are saying and honestly you are both right from your own perspectives! I know that’s a bit of a paradox but hear me out.
As things currently stand in the current evolution of ERPNext, my personal opinion is that we are in a bit of a chicken and egg scenario.
Frappe as the core maintainers have built ~90% of the product and are understandably frustrated and struggling to keep up with the continous demands of the community. It is clearly unfair to expect them to bear most of the load if this product is to be made world class. Unfortunately, having built 90% of the product, 90% of the knowledge is also stuck with Frappe!
The community on the other hand I strongly believe contains its fair share of people who WANT to help and contribute in the true spirit of open source (there will always be the freeloaders who take without giving back but they will always exist). However 2 big barriers to this are 1) Speed of development by Frappe where versions are being updated a few times each month and 2) the limited nature and quality of the documentation. There is a whole thread dedicated to a bunch of people who want to understand better how things work under the hood and are willing to pay for this!
Unfortunately the current status is a stalemate where neither party is incentivised to make a change for the better. This is frustrating for me to see, because clearly this product has potential to be something amazing and not living up to it because of this will be a tragedy.
As of now, the way out I can see is to make the project MORE developer / community friendly by lowering the barriers to contribute, both in terms of version stability as well as documentation quality. Unfortunately at this time, this can only be done by Frappe due to most of the knowledge and control of the project being with them. This will be more work in the short term, but in the longer term, I believe it will move things towards what you have in mind, where the community builds and contributes it’s fair share to the project.
@rmehta - I want Frappe figure this out and would love to help if possible. I’m located in Mumbai so please let me know if you would like to catch up and have a conversation about this.
I dont know about you guys, but enterprises I know are desperate & looking to replace their Oracle / SAP installations ( 2 -3 Million$ in yearly fee )with erpnext. Namely cause suddenly to many of them “Proprietary & Licensed” software is expensive ( atleast in the region i am in ). There is money to be made
Our current global economics dictates the down fall of traditional licensed software. ML, AI, Block Chain any new cutting edge field in technology is Open Sourced. It is the new norm.
I think much energy needs to be put out to reaching out to these companies and spreading awareness. Because Pure Open Source products is much attractive to them than wannabe ones.
And those with the sharpest of skills stands to reap the benefits.
Yup… it is. But the reason there is so little contribution to your document leak is the same reason I gave before. The target moves to fast to get it written.
Well, good choice of words. However much I might like to share the stacks of documentation I have created already, it is all covered under NDA agreements because Like I said in the post:
This means that I wrote specific business practices and processes into each of their tailored documents that are considered “Confidential” confidential and cannot be shared with the public as it may reveal processes that they use as a edge over their competitors.
By writing user docs in this way they become more intuitive to the people that must read and use them every day.
So, of course I cannot publish them, and you get to belittle an active contributor again because it you didn’t like the information provided.
You still cannot see the forest for the trees. The ‘commons’, as you describe the project, is quite useful and deserving of respect. I grant it that respect daily. But just because something is ‘contributed’ does not mean it attracts the amount of attention the contributor might hope. It may even be deserving of constructive criticism sometimes even if non is offered out of respect.
In this thread however, you opened the doors to seeking out that constructive criticism in the form of a discussion, but you are not happy with the returned constructive criticism about what may be required to turn the corner on your revenue stream and generate more funds.
In that same line of thought (to stay consistent with the title of the thread),
Now that ERPNext it is much larger and more mature in it’s abilities and experiences, the ‘commons’ that you believe are worthy, may need some attention in order to attract users to Frappe Cloud and likewise increase funding of the project.
So again, why continue expanding the application wider before trying to pickup more users in the current modules?
Didn’t you start this thread to get information about how one might expand the monetization of the project? Or ore you purposely taking a tangent here to attack my ideas?
You appear to spend much more time taking pot shots at me than you do trying to articulate any counterpoints to my delivered point or to any answer of the questions I posed the address the supposed purpose of this thread.
In the end, wouldn’t your effort be better spent maybe looking at the root causes of your stagnant user growth on the cloud service you depend on as a revenue stream?
I thought that was why you started this thread in the first place.
You seem to want to demonize someone that is giving pointers worth at least considering rather than actually trying to solve your problem here.
What you thought was my ‘passion’ in this thread was just uncomfortable business points you are still hoping to avoid thinking about.
How exactly do you plan to evaluate your monetary model for ERPNext?
Maybe if we knew that, a different set of perspectives would be contributed in this thread and maybe from someone that is more in line with your model.
For me, I know how to use the model that you already have. So, it made sense to pass along what I learned about how to improve it.
I get it. Even people that get paid to generate something useful will feel the burnout. Look at how many current and active ‘paid’ developers have taken themselves out of the work-a-day corporate job market and have instead gone to a 'Gig" model for their means of making money. They do it to escape the burnout and still achieve their monetary goals. They say it gives them the time to stop and reflect on what worked and what did not work in the past before they start working on another aspect of any given project.
If you sense the overwhelming ‘burnout’ in your team, then why not look at where their efforts are helping to attract and keep users, versus where those efforts are generating even more work and frustration instead?
Do you still have a goal to generate more money for this so you can keep the project growing?
Wouldn’t it be prudent to consider re-directing the developer time into parts of the project that will help lock in users for the long term? Isn’t that how your model would be able to increase your monetary position (and therefore investment in the project)?
Do you think there are not enough domains already in ERPNext for your team to be able to capitalize on some of it?
Do you really believe that part in your very fist post here, that you cannot possibly make money with what you have already created?
I find it really hard to believe that you cannot se how this can generate revenue to finance your project. I use it to make a living, so certainly you can use it to generate money for your favorite projects and charities.
So there are plenty of folks trying to give you the same message. I just went the extra step to tell you the uncomfortable parts so you can work on getting those things out of your hair early and make faster progress to your goal.
You can choose to continue to bash my words, but wouldn’t it be better to actually move your needle forward a bit by starting to evaluate the steps needed to get ahead?
I really do not care what your opinion is of me or the points I laid out. I didn’t sugar coat any of the points you need to consider in order to get ahead with your monetization plan. You cannot ignore the hard stuff and still get ahead. So maybe get it out of the way early so you can be happier in your efforts.
Bash me if you will, but at least you know have both the good and the bad points of how to get ahead with this business model. So, I will have servered my purpose to shae the experience I gaind using this model, and you have to decide if those experiences and tasks are too uncomfortable for your team to handle.
I have been using ERPNext for my small business for about 3 months, and although it’s been of great help, I often get frustrated every time I try to customize it. I read the Documentation and there are too many gaps. I then ask in the forum and there are no answers. I search for older questions and find people asking 2-3 years later if such and such has been resolved and there is once again no answer, and it is followed by more people frustrated.
IMHO if the Frappe Team dedicated some time to transfer the knowledge they have through trainings (like the $100 training fee that’s been organized on the aforementioned thread but for 10 hours for 30 people), they could still target it as a Contributor Training, in which you could still get $300/hr income AND get another at least 15 contributors (thinking in a 50% rate of people interested in contributing).
I know the Frappe Team has worked for YEARS and it’s hard for me to even say this, as I haven’t contributed anything, but you have no idea how daunting it feels to begin doing it.
There are LOTS of people who would love just to feel helpful and part of the project, but we certainly lack the knowledge for the “getting started” contributing.
Just please help us out with the knowledge and with lots of people contributing we’ll get to finish the polishing job.
I am REALLY thankful for all the effort put into this great product, but that extra mile is really worth running.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this. In 2019, there can be no question that the open source model works, both financially and technically. Though I often disagree with the tone and framing of certain posts in this forum, I also think that it’s a mistake to dismiss it all as mere entitlement. People are invested in this platform, and in the world at large there are no shortage of organizations with very deep pockets who want to support an open source ERP system. If that support isn’t forthcoming, it’s up to the maintainers to understand why not.
@rmehta Rushabh, I have the utmost respect for what you’ve created here, and for the work you and your team have invested to make it happen. That’s why I’m so bothered by the cynicism I see in some of your posts here. This forum can be a valuable resource, but I hope most of your strategic thinking is based on deep discussions with a much broader set of potential users. I would hope you’re talking, for example, to service providers in other successful open source ecosystems, to understand how and why they contribute to the projects they depend on.
I’m only starting to learn about ERPNext, but I’ve spent a number of years in the Drupal and Moodle communities. It’s notable how different the dynamics are there and here.
Before you make such statements, it would be great if you can see the number of contributions that are being merged in the core every week, both in code and documentation.
Well there are lots of people here, like @bkm and @vivek on this thread who can also help in making beginner documentation. There are enough developers out there who are also doing paid trainings. Why not them?
Well I am sure there are generic parts. If you have 5 customers, it will save you from writing the same documentation again and again and I am sure your customers would not mind to allow you to post it publicly if you just ask.
You say philosophy is not my strong point, but I can see a philosophical problem here. You put your needs above the needs of the community. I think both are important.
How can you presume that I am so dumb? We have more than 100+ tickets that we are solving for our paid customers. What we do at Frappe is our own strategy. Do you want our attention? Well, show that you are worth it. Why not donate 10% of your revenue to the foundation?
I am not cynical. I am a realist. As you can see from this thread there are a lot of people who can go that extra 10% and become contributors, but they choose to rant on the forum and say this project is going to die.
Well, people are free to have their opinions. We are on a mission and we will go through it. We have a great opportunity if more people put their time and money where their mouth is.
The real reason service providers are pissed off is because they have customizations that become obsolete with each major release. And each major release is awesome. In their own self interest, they could end up contributing their customizations or force us to slow down. Well we are going to go faster than ever and I wonder if its even wasting time with people who don’t add real value instead of spending time writing or reviewing code or documentation.
ERPNext is under rapid development and both core features and new features are being built, all of which are contributed to the community (our customers actually appreciate our contributions). Either you can help or you can rant. Again, coming back to the main topic, the real problem is our values and self worth in society is defined by individualism. If we cannot balance it with communitarian thought and effort, we will be doomed.
Just want to emphasize one aspect Rushabh mentioned. Contribute as much content as you possibly can to take the load off your shoulders to support the code/documentation. The stuff you push to erpnext repo will be carried on by the community and frappe. This will make rapid version change way less painful and also reduce update frequency due to increased content amount that requires to be checked and tested before major changes happening during version changes.
So again, my question is, how are “you” willing to help here? How about if you starting looking at new features and start reviewing them and sharing your views?
That’s wonderful. If you’re happy with the way things are – with the character and quantity of contributions you receive from people outside Frappe Tech – there’s absolutely nothing else to talk about.
EDIT: This post was made in good faith, but it seems not to have been received as intended that way. I’d love to be able to explain what I mean further, but the thread has been locked and I will respect that. In any case, Rushabh, it would be very helpful to many I think if you clarified somewhere the kind of relationship you hope to cultivate between the maintainers and the community. Right now, I’m not sure it’s obvious to any of us.
This is exactly the reason, just because of a handful of people, the forum is waste of time and I regret making the original post. You just chose to make a sweeping conclusion that “I am happy the way things are”, when I am actively engaging to drive change.
