Dear community,
As a part of Frappe’s overall branding strategy and realignment of assets, we are going to project erpnext.com as the product website, instead of erpnext.org, which will be the foundation website.
As a part of this shift, we are also moving the /docs folder to erpnext.com repository (which is also open source)
This has been given a long and hard thought including taking help from brand consultants. The reasons are:
- The websites erpnext.org and erpnext.com are very similar and new users will be confused between them.
- Over the years, the paid users on erpnext.com have been driven the funding for most of the product features, and if there are more paid users on erpnext.com, it will give Frappe more muscle to keep investing in the product and the framework.
- None of these changes affect the way you can use the documentation or the license (CC-BY-NA)
In the long run, investing in a strong hosting offering is the best way to sustain the open source effort. If ERPNext does go on and become very popular, the “value extractors” such as Amazon AWS will end up capturing all the value, and they have no incentive in keeping investing in the product.
Popular products such as Redis (which is a part of the Frappe stack) and MongoDB have been hit hard by AWS and have changed in their licensing policy (see linked articles).
We think it is the wrong move to change licenses, instead, betting on a strong ERPNext.com that is committed to 100% open source is the best way to ensure the platform and the product is well supported.