There is quite some discussion about funding development work for ERPNext. After reading them I am unsure if there is a common and working way to help the ecosystem by funding work.
I assume that if our company would start using ERPNext, it would be easier for me to add money / funds than developers for the ecosystem. So understanding how that can work would be helpful and welcome.
Feel free to reach out to me directly here or via Telegram if you do not want to post publicly in the forum. Who can help?
@Martin_Seibert the bounty system did not work out. Currently from what we know, ERPNext devs have a lot of work so they are not interested in the bounties, or just that the amounts are too low.
It might be a better idea to do bigger campaigns and go to standard fund-raising sites. For example if someone wants to build a native ERPNext app, can start a campaign for $100k on indiegogo or similar and it has a good chance of getting funded. That person needs to first do a proof-of-concept and put out a vision of what the project will do.
Unfortunately Open Source is often equated with “cheap”, we should set very high standards if we want good quality devs to build stuff for us.
Thanks for speaking your mind. I had the impression that it got stale at some point. But hearing it from you makes things clear and helps me plan. It’s good to hear that people earn enough money. Also a good sign for the community.
One idea that I have is to hire people to develop additional features for us. I would want such features to land in the core product to be available for the community. We would pay. Everyone would be able to use. Is there a best practice path to make sure, that things can find there way into the product?
It has been a huge struggle to communicate this to the community. But alas this falls on deaf ears.
Most people still build features for their own private systems, without thinking about their own ability to keep migrating to newer releases. I can see some acceptance, but still we have miles to go.
True open source projects are built where the first choice is to add it to the core so not only is the change permanent but also can benefit other users.
I take from your answer that you did not have the challenge yet, that you did not want to accept a new feature as it would not fit into ERPNext. The challenge is rather that more people should contribute their stuff back to the community, right?
The fallacy is that, a lot of entrepreneurs think in a “zero sum game” manner. I have invested in this. If I now share this, others will exploit my investment. So I rather don’t share. Here is my list of reasons to contribute back:
You get validation for your features from the community and thus some quality assurance.
If your use case is helpful others will use it and the world will become better (through your actions).
If others use it they will ask questions, think about it and eventually improve it. You may think, that answering questions or writing documentation is painful. But it’s another way of validating that your processes aren’t screwed.
The community will help make your use cases be compatible with new versions of the product.
The open source community gets stronger with your contributions and thus the success of all people in it. A healthy and prosperous community is what it needs to fight the heaps of money that commercial companies have who are in competition with this solution.
If you are a ERPNext consultant you should want all of your work to be in the core. It will improve your role and relevance in the community. People who want to enhance in the areas that you contributed are most likely to end up buying your services as you are the mastermind of this code. It’s the best way to increase your revenue.
People who do not try to contribute their software into the core are in most cases pretty early and immature in their adoption of open source.
If you are the ERPNext champion in your company: Think about it. You can make a difference.
It is a matter of culture. This culture reflects the behaviour of people in this community. Your own behaviour is a shining example. Let’s see how and if we can change the behavior of others in the community in the future.
How do you convert a post into an article? What do you mean by this?
I have recently posted a job for helping us with consulting on ERPNext. Quite a few members of the ecosystem reached out to me. Together with our team at //SEIBERT/MEDIA we have decided, that we want to make it a prerequisite for consultants to be active contributors to the ERPNext core on github.
Some of my mails to consultants read like this:
I have checked your github activity. Unfortunately you have not yet contributed anything significant to the public ERPNext repository at GitHub - frappe/erpnext: Free and Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) recently. We want to work with and support active members and supporters of the codebase. Being active is a sign of quality, reliability and strength in our opinion. We highly encourage you to start contributing and build a track record that shows that you are a valued member of the community.
I was delighted to get this reply by one consultant: “Thanks for your advice, I just start writing apps and supporting new users on forum. Not yet start contribute to ERPNext core, I will spend my time to do it, make more value for community.”
Everybody should find their own way for professional help. But relying on public, proven and tested activity like contributions to the github core or activity in this discussion forum is definitely a best practice worth considering. If you are a consultant. Think about it and start engaging in the community.