Dear community,
There is an important announcement we want to make regarding the role of the ERPNext foundation and its path going forward. As of today, the foundation conducts the following activities:
- ERPNext Conference
- Member listings
- Bounty payments
- Internships
- Project support
- Mumbai Hackathon
- IndiaOS Conference
Most of the money is generated from the member listings. The foundation does not have any full time employees or managers and the activities are managed by volunteers. Current directors are @revant_one @prakash_hodage @nabin and myself, and the voting is controlled by the employees at Frappe.
We are planning to change this. One of ERPNext’s biggest deployments is at India’s largest stock broker, Zerodha. Zerodha has also been a very visible evangelist of ERPNext and a supporter of the foundation’s work. Along with Zerodha and Frappe, the foundation also hosted the IndiaOS conference which brought the entire Indian open source community on one platform and was also a great opportunity to showcase ERPNext to the broader Indian community.
Zerodha has a fantastic team and they are very keen on taking the foundation forward not only for ERPNext but for many other projects. They also have access to considerable financial resources via their network compared to Frappe and are completely aligned to the free and open source philosophy. We are happy to announce that representatives of Zerodha will now have 50% voting rights and will also be directors on the board.
Along with this, we are also planning to expand the activities of the foundation to help bring more FOSS projects under its umbrella. For this we have decided to rename the foundation and expand its objects.
The foundation will now be called “FOSS United Foundation” subject to approval of the name.
How will this impact the operations?
It will not have any impact on how the things are run at the moment, and the activities like the conference and bounties will be continued to be paid out. The ERPNext & Frappe Framework projects themselves are not impacted either and continue to be maintained by the maintainers. The current funds in the foundation, will be parked in a cost center and will only be spent for ERPNext related activities. The foundation itself will expand its activities and support many more projects under the umbrella, akin to a Mozilla or Apache foundation.
From Frappe’s point of view, we always wanted the foundation to be a separate organization, but wanted partners who had “skin-in-the-game”. With Zerodha we have found the first partner. We hope to find many more partners like Zerodha in this journey and make this a truly community platform with more participation. We also hope this platform becomes a springboard to launch many more projects like ERPNext which will benefit the entire global community.