ERPNext Conference Europe - Some thoughts

We had two days of great discussion and meeting awesome people and talking ERPNext and Frappe Framework (yes!). Most the credit should go to @dominik and the team at ESO Electronic for being such awesome leaders, hosts and believers of the product and open source way of life.

ERPNext Needs _____

At such events, the first thing people ask us (ERPNext devs) is that ERPNext needs _____. If ERPNext had that feature, it would be the most awesome thing ever. It could be a specific feature like GL codes, documentation, or that one button that will fix all the problems.

No doubt that these are all great requirements, and there is also doubt that once we fix these, the next set of requirements will show up. That is the nature of the product, because we have seen this for the past 5-6 years. There is never a finish line.

Welcome to the Community

When we pushed ERPNext as open source, that was way back in 2008, it was not something that was really important and we did not really understand what it meant. Sometime in 2013 or 2014, a community started to form around the product and that really changed our thinking.

As the current developers / maintainers of Frappe and ERPNext, we cannot solve everyone’s problems and we also do not want to either. If we wanted to, we would need a lot more resources and people to fix everyone’s problems and we would have to raise finance to do it. That is the path most open source ERP projects have taken before us.

But as we progressed, we learnt from other open source projects. We got inspired from Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Wordpress, Linux, Mozilla and so many others. Raising finance from private capital is not the only way to make software as all these pioneers have shown us. If you believe in community and play by the rules, it can also be a great model for collaborative development.

And we are still learning this, so are all the people who are associated with ERPNext.

Open Source

These conferences and events also turn out a great way in spreading of the open source way of life. We all live in a society where the meaning of our lives is linked to how much wealth we can accumulate, because at one point, wealth used to be a proxy for how much value we create for others. But now that is changing. Today we are talking of automation and universal incomes, and our lives our going to have to search for new way to measure meaning, other than wealth. The theory says that meaning to life comes when we are helpful to others. So this is why open source is so attractive. It not only is a great way to share solutions to problems (like ERP systems) but also to bring more meaning to everyone’s life.

We are also beginning to see a core community form inside ERPNext. Apart from us, Dominik, Antonious and Jayaprakash have now been part of multiple conferences and they “own” ERPNext as much as any one of the core-devs do. Also there are many more who are contributing in many many other ways and this is creating a virtuous cycle.

By the end of the conference, someone told me. “I hope you don’t offer us Kool Aid now”. Attending these events feels surreal for a lot of people and that is what makes it work. We at Frappe are happy to make whatever is needed to make large scale community involvement and ownership happen and we already see a lot of potential.

With this conference, the community just got deeper. Towards the end, no one asked me about their favourite missing feature. I could see it in their eyes that they were thinking about how they can make it happen themselves and contribute back to the community.

But we must also realize that we are only at the beginning of this journey. We are just a bunch of scrappy upstarts and outcasts. Lot of work is still to be done, lots of discussions are yet to happen, lots of decisions are to be taken, but every day it is getting clearer that the “open source” way of life will show us the way.

42 Likes

Thank you to all the participants who made this a great event and thank you @rmehta and @nabinhait for coming all the way to participate and being so passionate about making this a community open source project.

11 Likes

The conference was amazing - thank you for the inspiring sessions, the knowledge transfer and everything around the conference. And a big “thank you” to Dominik and the whole team for the perfect organization!

Great to hear that many other people in Europe are also fascinated of ERPNext - I’m looking forward for the next European conference and for a good coorperation between the European ERPNext companies.

3 Likes

Nice read. I think it would be also great exposure for the project to participate in FOSDEM next year.

1 Like

Excellent article.Much more inspiring than I thought.It was great. Special thanks to Nabin and Rushabh who came down all the way from India ,Carly and Dominik for organizing and food choice,and yes the sponsors because I have never been at a conference with such excellent breakfast/lunch for so little money.

4 Likes

Congratulations on a great conference. Too bad I missed it this time around.

Thanks

Jay

1 Like

Hello Everyone,

Glad to hear that everyone had a great time. It was our pleasure to host this event. Thanks again to our awesome sponsors, Cloude8, Industrial Automation Group Australia, and Tayseer Tech (http://tayseer-tech.com.sa/). Without these sponsors, the event would not have been possible! And of course, it was your participation and interest that made it great. I hope we can host another conference here in Europe again soon.

3 Likes

Hi!

Joining many thanks to core team -@rmehta/@nabinhait and ESO Electronic team!

Looking forward to meet you all again!

1 Like

There are recordings of the conferences and will be uploaded to the youtube channel?

1 Like

have a look at https://www.youtube.com/user/esoelectronic/live

3 Likes

Any chances if you made a video for 1st day afternoon where you gave how erpnext works demonstration to small group?

Unfortunately not. We had reserved that room in case some people are more interested in lighter customization and use cases but didn’t tape it. Next time!

:+1:
:+1:

We have to take note that open source projects such as above are catered to the masses, not on a specific niche and platform. An ERP is not only business critical but time critical as well and the demographic of users are not as broad as let’s say Wordpress. I think it will be better if you take a look at the opensource and business model of Moodle where deployment is organisation specific. Raising finance, while having community’s contribution via a commercial ecosystem, is very important to sustain the life cycle of a product and allow Frappe Technologies to expand the capabilities to resolve bugs, create and maintain the ever changing documentation and adding of features. Just my opinion.

1 Like

Congratulations to all the team, and to Dominik.
Missed it.

1 Like

Correct me if I’m wrong on some points, but with the start of the ERPNext foundation the Frappe team is taking a step back from feature development to focus more on their cloud hosting business which is their main income. Frappe will be a part of the foundation too of course, but the direction of ERPNext will be the responsibility of the foundation.

This of course will take some time to fully happen, but I believe we will see:

  • the foundation organizing community groups who will be responsible for maintaining and advancing specific modules
  • Frappe focusing mainly on features and fixes that will benefit their cloud hosting business (just like everyone else who builds features to benefit their company or clients.)
  • community engagement being very much required to push the software forward

Personally, I think this is a wonderful thing for ERPNext, but might get a little messy in the changeover process. Ultimately, Frappe handing the keys over to the foundation means the software will stay open source, which is a huge thing. Frappe’s decision to not make money directly from development of the software, and instead from deployment, has made us all the lucky users.

The thing to really watch is how much the community of users will step up to support and maintain and develop this software. Soon the days will over where we can just poke the Frappe team to fix something or build new features for our benefit

:slight_smile:

6 Likes

The conference was a GREAT experience btw. Thank you @Carly_Kal, @dominik and the who ESO team, as well as @rmehta and Nabin for making this wonderful event possible. I learned a lot at the training day, but I was most excited to meet the community.

Great people makes a great product!

3 Likes

The Foundation is a definite signal to users that ERPNext will not go into direction of Odoo. Any development requires resources, time and effort which translates to cost. Between getting community and Frappe to develop and fix bugs, I personally much prefer Frappe team to do it because they know the application inside out. As such, it will be much more faster. And Frappe definitely needs resources for this. Community is essential for feedback for features and bug fixes to make it into a strong and reliable product. As mentioned, an ERP is business critical.

If you look at Moodle, they offer a whole range of services like cloud hosting and a certification.
However, their main source of income it seems comes from their Partners. Working closely with Partners will go a long way imo.

Frappe focusing mainly on features and fixes that will benefit their cloud hosting business (just like everyone else who builds features to benefit their company or clients.)

This is very worrying if this statement rings true. It should bring benefit to ERPNext as an application on a whole.

The thing to really watch is how much the community of users will step up to support and maintain and develop this software. Soon the days will over where we can just poke the Frappe team to fix something or build new features for our benefit

The ERP community is very much lesser than Wordpress, Wikipedia. That is why I think the comparison is a bit off. Putting up bounty is a great idea to give incentives to developers.

1 Like

Moodle is absolute horrible for end users and the core platform seems to be stagnated

For a partner, a commercial license is an easier way out and importantly a much easy sell.

In the end it is important to remember that ERPNext is built for the users not partners. Any platform that is built thinking the user first will ultimately break the barrier that other business focussed open source apps have failed to do.[quote=“mulyadi-agtechsg, post:20, topic:21523”]
It should bring benefit to ERPNext as an application on a whole.
[/quote]

Any thing that is good for ERPNext Cloud users, is good for everyone!

Perfect. Could not have said it better :ok_hand:

Thanks for making it to the conference and glad to see you are taking the spirit further :slight_smile:

1 Like