The person is trying to make an entire ERPNext clone and sell it.
We can sting the operation as bid on the post and get interviewed and trace the person down
I am really hurt seeing such intention to such thriving non-profit community and project.
Just thought to share and check if that’s fine by the foundation
OMG! the title of the post is interesting, for a moment i thought of editing it & make it a more non-objectionable. but then thought its precisely a feeling all of us have when some doesn’t intent to contribute back and only take without giving back.
@rmehta@JayRam is there some protection we have under MIT/GNU convention to safeguards our interest from such white-labels. If there is one, i would like to work with you and get this stopped at current stage of our community.
May be we would set a mark for people to not mess with EN community OR we as a community would learn to live with such non-sense. in either of the case we would benefit.
Thank you for highlighting for the good of community. I also notices someone from Hyderabad, India has almost created his shop around EN with restaurant module and some other industry not currently part of core.
i think i got link from LinkedIn, let me dig again those trails and identify the details to share it on this thread.
I fear there is no protection from this king of private fork. GNU license is quite clear in this area I believe. Whitelabelling can be done, they should only keep copyrights and authorship in their code base. They have to license their code under GPLv3 terms too, but, in cloud / SaaS mode, accessing the software through the Web is not considered as distribution and can be seen as private use… so they have not to distribute their code for their customers. Only AGPL (Affero GPL) protects against this kind of usage, considering remote access is distribution and then legally need source code distribution.
That said, people can white-labelling but, as this will be much effort to follow ERPNext developments still white labelling them, they will soon lack behind ERPNext master. As they won’t have knowledge of core developer nor skilled community contributors, my bet they will fail, soon or later…
Thank you my friend to teach me more on this. I think i need to go back to my copyright textbooks & learn more about these licenses.
If AGPL is better in providing protection then may be we should as EN-Foundation should look at it. I completely agree with your last point on competing with community is not possible. May be we should keep watch on what additional things they build & bring in core to make them redundant - what you say?
Yes, I guess this a subject for foundation. AGPL has more protection (but the philosophy behind GPL licences are protections for users, not for developers), but it can be seen as risky for some customers : because every remote user can ask source code, every employee or user accessing the portal (maybe even the website) can legitimately ask for all code, including custom scripts.
Forking the project and calling it something else is possible as long as it stays open source. If that is not the case anymore the foundation’s responsibility will be protecting the project and pursuing legal action against license breaches.
I wouldn’t overreact to this. Somebody thinks that s/he can actually build a sustainable white label on ERPNext would need to throw the same amount of resources that the Foundation and Frappe is investing in.
And in many cases it is better for such people to experience the difficulties than to be told about it.
ERPNEXT is gaining popularity on really fast base recently, and don’t think customers are completely stupid and will not find out.
ERPNext is evolving at fast base, and someone who does complete whitelabeling or customization can’t keep his product up to date. Here in middle east, there is a company who white labeled ERPNEXT and introduced too much customizations and now they are stuck on version 4. Even though at the beginning they gained lots of costumers, they lost those customers so fast when service providers approached their customers and showed them the latest version of ERPNEXT.
I though to invite this person after 2-3 months in ERPNext meet up to share his experience about white labelling
Complete whitelabeling is not feasible and profitable. It will require lots of resources and money to develop such thing.
When you develop such thing after some interval of time, you will find Core ERPNext and Frappe has improved a lot with new features and bug fixes in new release. Current forked instance after white labelling will start giving some wired error and very hard to fix.
Note: You will also get same experience when you make changes in core files and maintaining two forks of ERPNext and Frappe (Even if you are not doing whitelabeling)
Solution for this problem is keep framework level changes in frappe core itself by contributing it back.
We had one of our telecom company who used erpnext and white labelled in to give it to the customers on subscription bases.
I personally sign-up for it to test and found out it is erpnext completely white labelled with the telecom companies name and brand.
They have taken down the project since my trial period expired. They changed the E logo to B with red colour and powered by their brand name.
It is not an easy task to white label such a huge project. So does who think they can do it will need alot of resource to successfully do it and after that they might not be able to upgrade to the newer version.
- what you say?
