[Discussion] Who Are We?

[lalnco]

can we have a dislike button also on this forum. Only heart is not sufficient. Some comments needs dislike as i do not want to spend time negatively criticizing some negative commenters

@qualitymarkup: Friend, ERPNext is Open Source and it needs be driven the way top givers think. I’m sure all of us agree that, people who give more to community have more louder voice and i completely support @rmehta call of asking commitment for contribution.

However, I really like the approach of @Not_a_countant of being positive to attract more positives

[olamide_shodunke]

Your post shows a lack of understanding of Rmehta’s post and of open source in general.

No one is asking service providers not to make money, you can make enough from customisations, implementation and provision of services.

Rmehta’s point is, whatever customisation’s or features you add to the software, make it available to the community, that way ERPNext is stronger and we do not have to be reinventing the wheel individually. Is that too much to ask? Meanwhile the people who hoard their customisations are always very quick to come on line to ask for help when they are stuck. That is selfishness and should be discouraged.

I hope I have explained this simply enough for you to understand? I am sure you did not understand else you would not have been so quick to label a group of people naive. That was tactless and uncalled for.

Warm regards

[mulyadi-agtechsg]

I understand frustration from @qualitymarkup.

However, service providers should realise this.

• ERPNext does not owe us anything
• We can look at other open source projects for our clients.

To me ERPNext has a huge potential but it seems they are looking more to users instead of service providers. I do agree that ERPNext should be looking at service providers too with ERPNext looking at taking a cut from projects. This allows ERPNext to have another avenue of funding to make ERPNext a much stable project. Maybe make it mandatory for service providers to share the customization too.

Also, service providers are able to give more case studies and use cases as they work with multiple companies and rarely stuck to a certain domain or industry. This will give ERPNext more insight of companies’ requirements globally.

It is not impossible for service providers to work closely with ERPNext, newmatic.io is one very good example.

[spoojary]

The last time(two months back?) this discussion came to forefront, we took some measurable actions like forming the module volunteers group to increase the contributions like forum answers, github issues, feature development etc. That seemed to have improved the contributions to some extent, but perhaps no where near we expected. I am assuming this discussion wouldn’t have opened if that was hugely successful. It is very easy to be emotional and come up with inspirational messages, but that will do very little unless it translates to measurable actions(even better quantified with data). I feel it is too early to write off the module volunteer initiative and should do some kind of retrospective to check what should be done differently to be more successful at it.

Earlier I said I have just 1% of selfless dedication that rmehta has. Despite a lot of talk, I feel that is true for majority of the active members and nill for a lot of others. As a start, I worked on a bank statement feature. Despite a lot of progress, we are yet to get it to a working state as a community project.

@rmehta

We want everyone who is able, to put in contributions first to ERPNext before they ship them to their customers

That is impractical for most of the people. Anything that goes into ERPNext should meet certain level of maturity, else it has the potential to damage more than the benefit it adds. If everyone sends a pull request to whatever they are doing, do we even have the bandwidth to review/manage all those pull requests? Unlikely, and in most of the cases it might be just a waste of crucial gatekeeper time.

@rmehta

I have invested by developer time building them, so all the benefit should accrue to me”. While this may be a rational way of thinking, but it does not help the community.

When I started using ERPNext for our business, I had to import some data from Tally. I couldn’t find any plugins for Tally data import, so I went ahead and wrote few lines of code to import the data. Now, why don’t I give it back to the community?
Two reasons.

1. I am ‘greedy’ and want to make money from what I did
2. What I did was very minimal and needs a lot of effort before it can be used by others

I belong to (2) and the code is available in my github profile or anyone to use. However, truly speaking the difference is minor between (1) and (2). It basically boils down to the amount of time I am willing to give to the community. Ideally we should give a fair share of what we have received from the community. But the problem is identifying what that ‘fair’ share is and making it ‘mandatory’ to make that contribution. We cannot make anything mandatory by asking people to contribute. Neither can we exclude people from community. That doesn’t leave us with many options. In any case, I suggest

1. We continue to make progress with our earlier initiative of module ontributors
2. Look objectively at the ways to take fair share of the community contributions back

[qualitymarkup]

I am sorry if I have been rude about it. What I meant to say is that ERPNext should evaluate a way to generate some profit so they use it to fund the project, and they surely cannot rely on the community and contributors at this stage.

I do like ERPNext and currently building extensive customizations to use it in my own business, but seriously, not sure if it is feasible to share these customizations with the community when they’re tailored to my own needs.

[absmachin]

Its really nice going through the posts and seeing commens of diverse variants. In my opinion, the case of type 1 and type 2 is a natural phenomenon. It exists in every system.

All that is needed is to encourage the type 1s to see the global picture of the goal of ERPNext and tap into it. Excluding them from the community would mean excluding vital info or added solution that may later come from them.
I dont write coees and not a programmer, but i have given suggestions in some of the modules that meets universal standards, even though they are are yet to be implemented. I have recommeneded ERPNext to businesses too and even deployed.

So every type1 person should extend their hands of fellowship by either recommending or contribute professional ideas that would bring ERPNext to be the foremost ERP every business would want to use.

I also want to use this medium to ask. We were ask to suggest where we would like to function in terms of module review. I have stated the modules i want to be part of, but till date not even one meeting or discussion from that angle for those in charge of the module review. Am i missing something?

[lalnco]

@absmachin

where we would like to function in terms of module review. I have stated the modules i want to be part of, but till date not even one meeting or discussion from that angle for those in charge of the module review

maybe this post skipped your view: List of module volunteers - #31 by revant_one
If not, you could contact module lead mentioned in above link for the domain of your interest and start getting involved.

For eg: I’m part of accounts module, and our Lead has decided to create Telegram group to discuss ideas and other things. We also had 1-2 meetings also. Once something substantial gets discussed or initiatives being taken, it is brought to the larger forum.

[nmami]

Hi everyone,
I’m new in the open source area/culture, initially I have worked with oracle ERP for long period as functional SCM.

Back to your thoughts, I’ll suggest a win-win approach putting end users (final client of ERPNext), service providers (SP) and a central development center (DC) (exist or not I don’t know) where it should be managed by strong processes/communication/development tools…

To be franc I’m interested to make business using ERPNext as SP but the problem how much I will invest in developer/functional resources with a risk to not get any project.

Here the idea, at ERPNext headquarter or somewhere a development center (DC) will be implemented.

1)Free-Free option: SP will request development services from headquarter to implement new feature on top of ERPNext community product, SP will give functional spec, Testing and so on in the other hand DC will perform development and QC.

2)Paid option : SP will request development services from headquarter to be delivered to end user (final client) most of the cases it’s a customization requested by client who will be charged, it’s a cost plus approach, DC will charge SP for the development hours, the same will add a margin of 20% for example and bill his client. DC will own delivered features and the same can be used as contributions.

other option, keep showing SP membership active only if minimal requirements are met (3 valid contribution per year for example).

Similarly, final client/freelancer can use this model.

Benefit : ERPNext keep growing with more and more features and free for download.
ERPNext DC get source of revenu
SP business is gowing on
final client will be happy.

Drawback : opensource ethics should be respected. like SP will not request an enhancement using Free-Free option instead they are charging final client

Just thoughts…Happy to join the team I need your guidance.

Regards
Nofal Mami

[Not_a_countant]

This is a pure open source software project and we are quite passionate about it. Either one contributes or doesn’t. Everything goes into the pot. Not sure this community is open to a paid option. And i support that philosophy.

Suggestion to you: go through the previous discussions and see where or hearts are.