ERPNext Open Source Software Foundation (EOSSF)

Community Foundation
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@Francois_Ifitwala I could imagine that a mixture of several aspects (which are yet to be defined could earn you vote(s). An example:

[Membership fee] x 1 = X

[code] x 2 = Y
[contribution] x 1.5 = Z

Total votes = X + Y + Z

I guess one had to define how to calculate numbers to the variables [code] & [contribution]. I assume you can pull some values from github, or this forum, or (whether it exists) a developer forum, …

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Great suggestions by everyone.

Here are the objects: EOSSF - MoA - Google Docs

Please feel free to comment.

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Thank you @rmehta I have made changes inspirad by the Python Software Foundation’s Mission Statement and I will ask Carly to proof read the whole thing.

Important: If anybody feels like contributing anything other than correcting a typo or formatting please track changes!

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@Francois_Ifitwala and @vrms you both address very good points, let me contribute what I think about this together:

I think every individual or company should be able to be a member and that’s it, it should be democratic in the basic sense. We have to make sure that the board approves or doesn’t approve members to prevent any hostile take over.

I believe we should keep it straigth and simple and money or resources should not be able to buy you votes. Imagine this: Odoo contributes 500,000.00 $ and formally puts all of it’s developers on the team, they would be able to make all decisions themselves.

I think one member is one vote and the reason sponsors don’t get to vote is quite a practical consideration. Imagine this, we have to invite all members to the annual conference, sponsors want to sponsor, they don’t want to come and vote with one vote, they execute their influence in different ways. Anyways somebody or a company can be an active member and a sponsor.

The idea of sponsorship and the “status” of sponsorship should be completely detached from the membership of the foundation. Your calculation example of fee, code and contribution could be used to determine how VIP a sponsor is, I really like that idea instead of saying pay us X amout of money.

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@dominik, @vrms, @Francois_Ifitwala Thanks all for the comments,

Jordan Hubbard had some nice suggestions when he was here at the conference.

  1. The core team (the committers to the master branch) should be separate from the foundation. This has to be based on meritocracy. Right now its just us, but there are quite a few developers who are getting active like @max_morais_dmm, @ccfiel and others, so we can always expand the team of core-committers. I think its the same way with Linux and most open source projects.

  2. The role of the foundation should be to evangelize and grow the product and fund features based on bugdet. If we have budget, we can have a group of developers who are on the foundation’s payroll. The goals and performance of these members should be decided by the executive committee of the foundation. Or the foundation could just release bounties that could be taken up by any developer.

  3. The executive committee should be elected by the members and should be responsible for budgets, events, bounties, developers on payroll, fellowships (we could do fellowships for active developers).

  4. The revenue of the foundation could be from sponsorship, service provider listings (we have already said we are happy to move that to the foundation)

It is important to note that the foundation is in addition to the ERPNext project which is an independent open source project (even from Frappé). Any competitor will never do this, because they know the community can always fork the project (for example M$ will never try and take over Linux Foundation). Even we as Frappé have to play within a certain framework if we want this to grow as an open source project.

Communities can never be bought :smile:

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Thanks @dominik to pushing this forward. The Foundation would be a huge step and would be right in time for the growing community.

We strongly beliebe that the foundation will be bringing:

  • more legal security
  • more trust in the project
  • more financial security

Sometimes this points are conflicting goals, for that the mix on board and within memberships are leads to accepted results. Neither Money nor idealism should be the entity. You need both within the foundation to help to succeed.

And more important nothing leads to dependence, both will be replaced by the community within a conflict case.

Best

Michael

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That was exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my message.

Thanks for the clarification.

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@rmehta have you checked out the edited document? Carly and I made some changes that you should check and approve if you agree.

This is what Carly wrote:

Hi Everyone, I did a first read over the text and made comments throughout where meaning needs to be clarified. One big difference is that I made all points begin with the “ING” verbal form, which is more standard with lists like this. I also separated the bullet points into a third section (Finances), please proof. Looking forward to your feedback!

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@dominik Thanks for your comments! Sorry I did not reply earlier. I do have some comments, but did not get time to add them.

I really love everyone getting involved in this :slight_smile:

Lets get the name approved and then discuss next steps, the memorandum and articles of association.

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Just received a confirmation from the Ministry:

“The Approved Company Name is ERPNext Open Source Software Foundation”

EOSSF then it is!

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Great :slight_smile: Congrats !

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@rmehta

Congratulations!

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I think the reality is a lot more nuanced that this. Here is how we see it:

  1. ERPNext is an independant open source project. The “source” is with you, so anyone can fork and keep maintaining it. Currently the “official” fork is followed because it is being heavily updated and improved, mostly funded by customers who sign up on erpnext.com (Frappe Ltd)
  2. There is an increasing community which consists of end-users (small and mid-sized companies) and service providers, lets call this erpnext.org
  3. Unlike most open source commercial products, Frappe Ltd does not intend to monetize services from this community other than if they eventually signup on erpnext.com
  4. So there are 2 commerical interests, “services” and Frappe Ltd and both the organizations (erpnext.org and erpnext.com) represent those interests. There are obvious overlaps. All contributions from erpnext.com directly go to the commons and contributions from erpnext.org will also come back to the commons. Surprisingly in this model, there are very few conflicts
  5. erpnext.com is not particularly interested in “enterprise” features for erpnext, which can be sponsored, maintained and forwarded by erpnext.org. This is also a huge opportunity for other service providers (other than Frappe Ltd) to become significant paid contributors.
  6. The project “erpnext” should be jointly managed by both erpnext.com and erpnext.org and should be based on meritocracy. Either ways erpnext is almost a platform and there could be apps (like Jasper integration by @luisfmfernandes or Alfresco Integration by @CWT, Amazon S3 integration by @ccfiel) that could be maintained by the community.
  7. Some of the common stuff like manuals, videos etc can be made by anyone in the community and again I don’t think there will be any conflicts here too.
  8. Either ways, erpnext.com has no real advantage other than the track record of supporting hundreds of organizations that run erpnext and the advantage of being the original publisher, because there are already tons of services providers enabled by bitnami

I think its a pretty clean structure, and we are pretty excited to see the energy of the community in taking this forward :smile:

Edit: Infact we will be really happy to handover the community to the foundation, so that we can concentrate on improving the product and our goal “making ERP simple!”

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Congrats @rushabh_mehta

We are very exited about next steps :slight_smile:

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@rmehta I was wondering would you consider naming as Frappe Foundation ? as that looks more promising than erpnext foundation.
Even otherwise this is a excellent initiative.
For the position of BOD or similar, there should be elections as done in the case of OpenStack. They conduct elections for it annually.

Please go through this

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I am happy to see this discussion is getting broader attention and so many of you are contributing their thoughts.

@rmehta I completely agree with your last statement. @vrms I think the foundation needs good articles of incorporation and a clear mission statement, however we have to remember the foundation much like the project itself is growing, ever changing and professionalizing. I think the same approach can be applied to he foundation. We should get help and experience in wherever possible but to me the primary goal right now is to get he foundation started with a set of core values and rules that we all intrinsically apply anyways and then improve as we go. This will take on a life of its own.

We aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel and all people involved at Frappe and the community are good people that (at the moment) want the same. Let’s create two entities that keep each other in Checks and Balances.

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I want to make one thing crystal clear! We should refrain from too much suspicion only because Odoo and co. have turned over to Freemium. The guys at Frappe are dedicated to Open Source and I think they have a mission larger than a paycheck.

The main reasons for me to push for the foundation at the moment are to facilitate development from the community and community engagement, a clear message that ERPNext is well funded and communally governed so people aren’t worried about that in their considerations and a bullet proof structure that develops as we go to brace for the growth this amazing product will go through while Frappe will grow beyond what we now imagine.

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that is true and that is good. An I really appreciate that we are even having this discussion.

But in the end it doesn’t really matter whether intentions have been good ones at any point in time. Legal construction are necessary for times where not everybody wants the same and not everybody is good hearted. That’s what a law is for, to govern a group of people with same or different interests.

I am not 100% sure whether it might be workable to ‘get started quickly and adopt as going along’ (that’s what I boil down your statement to) or whether its crucial to do it right to the comma from the start. I think once legal structures are established it might be pretty hard to adjust those due to mere practicalities and reluctance to touch such a dry matter ever again.

Don’t get me wrong it’s not that I am paranoid and don’t want to trust anyone. I am just thinking that it shouldn’t matter how circumstances or opinions might change in the future or not.

I admit that the example Odoo might have had some impact on my point of view though

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Since the EOSSF is governed by Companies Act, it will follow the mechanism provided in there. More details on this would be available from public docs available on MCA site, I believe.

ps: I’m late to this interesting discussion. I was actually searching for the legal name of foundation and stumbled upon this post.

_Liyakat