Should community contributions organized in a collaborative way?

Dear community,

Since I am from Odoo ecosystem and also been into Frappe for around 2 years now. So, during Frappe Local Indonesia, I got invited to present my though about Odoo and ERPNext and the reason I make a switch, my topic is Moving to A Peace of Mind.

In one of the slide, I mentioned the plus side of Odoo for having an independent Odoo Community Association (OCA), which is an awesome group of people who collaborate together to produce fully reviewed, high quality, open source modules. And trust me, Odoo S.A. do not want to promote this organization as it oppose their commercial strategy, so it is funded and operate on its own.

OCA was founded since 2013. The first objective was to ensure there there will be no “Reinventing the wheel” between partners. It has come long way, producing real life features that make Odoo more usable in real business case (since when it wasn’t really usable :p). Once module get merged into OCA repos, for example about invoicing, GitHub - OCA/account-invoicing: Odoo Invoicing Extension Addons, it can be enhanced, bug fixed, and migrated into next major version by interest contributors.

To me, Frappe and OCA has very much in common already in term of open source philisophy. I have seen many awesome people here in this forum, contribute tirelessly to Frappe Core and/or sharing their own open source module. Just that, in Frappe ecosystem, there is still nothing equivalent to OCA interm of community effort in building custom apps together.

But I think it could be better if there is a common ground that allow contributors to work together.


I know we have Frappe Marketplace Frappe Cloud Marketplace - But all are created independently, some modules are good some are bad, there is no standard (my modules included).

I saw Frappe Awesome - GitHub - gavindsouza/awesome-frappe: A curated list of awesome things related to the Frappe Framework that helps put together more modules that maketplace, it was helpful. But many of them are in very old version.

In Linkedin, I have seen a lot of cool apps created by partners all the time, but I think mostly are closed source and for own marketing. We heard about it but can’t touch it.

I have seen some initiative like Frappe Alliance - https://frappealliance.frappe.cloud/ so, I believe there are some group of people thinking the same, at least sometime back. Yet I contacted but no one response.

Frappe Tech itself, has already done great job. But on the community side, it can be better.


At the end of Frappe Local Indonesia. We have sat down throwing ideas, and the “collective contribution effort under one roof” is what I shared, and many seem to agree on.

Every open source community should have its unique way of doing things, may be the current state is already good for most people. But I am obligated to share the idea here, and curious to know how other partners/contributors think?

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Yes, you are not alone trying to do meaningful contribution to Frappe ecosystem and also would like to join forces with other contributors.

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But looks there arre not many. Before my this post, this awesome pot got only one reply and only 4 likes :frowning:

This is an amazing idea… I would love to volunteer … lets start small and see if its grows… thats how erpnext grew

what would be our first step?

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i think what frappe are doing is fair - profitability and survival (break-even) are a reality of life. If they are not profitable they will either go bankrupt or do the odoo way
They need to focus on their enterprise customers and gold partners then we the community can get an ecosystem which is high quality
I believe we are very lucky that frappe has not yet gone the odoo way (hopefully that will never happen as the greed of men knows no end)
So we the community need to suport them - be patient/understanding, create our own sollutuons and support each other - united we stand

1 Like