Thank you everyone for the comments and encouragement of the Partner Program. Will try my best to reply as many queries as I can!
There will be multiple tiers of partner and there will be no partner fee at the entry level.
Interacting with Service Providers over the past few months, we (FrappeTech) got to understand the challenges and opportunities there. Also having observed the way the ERP industry is structured, it has been completely via local partners. For FrappeTech, the goal will be to enable partners by offering trainings, evaluations, services and leads (which will be a mix of both free and paid), and a commission on both the hosted service on ERPNext.com and also our upcoming pricing for self-hosted support.
What FrappeTech brings to the table is expertise, availability and ongoing product investment and the partner will be responsible for local support and implementation. This way, we can grow the ERPNext community much faster. In the current service provider model, there is no incentive for the service provider to work with Frappe and vice versa.
By kind of separating our roles (though these will not be absolute, and cannot be absolute since we are in an open source environment) we will be able to leverage each other’s strengths.
This is not binding either. Service Providers are free to build their own ecosystems, and they will still have access to the same source code and we can still collaborate at the code level.
So the distinction will be that Frappe will run the ERPNext Partner Program (and not be a partner itself) and invest in training and services for the partners. I don’t think the foundation was the right entity for this (and in any project it is not the role of the foundation). The foundation will be a place where we can collaborate on our common objectives, mainly by funding projects that are of community interest.
Your comment about guaranteeing Open Source is that the license of ERPNext is GNU GPL v3. Any company that wants to move away from a pure open source (free software) model will change the licence (examples, Odoo, Redis, Elastic) to a more permissible one.
My personal view is that keeping the software free has nothing to do with the ability to be able to bill for services. If there are certain guarantees that a company that extracts value from ERPNext needs, then they should be willing to pay for it.
Please use your disappointment to do something positive for the community! “Scratch your own itch” is rule #1 of open source. I am sorry its harsh and brutal, but hey! the software that you serve your customers is 100% free and it is a fruit of someone’s labour. Please allow me to express a sense of disappointment to your sense of entitlement.
Yes, very much like Shopify, GSuite, Atlassian and almost every other serious software service!
Version 10 has been stable for quite a while. Maybe client installs should be tested before deploying them. Most good service providers will have their own processes around deploy.
Also the product will be developed at a rapid rate, and we improving the documentation and processes all the time. If you have better ideas, feel free to pitch in!
I think this is a great reason to push contributions to the core that are likely to break from a future release. ERPNext still has a lot of improvements to be built from a polishing and usability point of view.
Yes renames are expensive, but they are also important. For example renaming of “Email Alert” to “Notification” suddenly means that you use it for SMS or Slack notifications. So we cannot rule them out!