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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

>>> Tryton has taken a wildly different path than it's ancestor OpenERP

Could you elaborate ? I'm interested in knowing what are the differences, business wise (I think Odoo is now on the web and Tryton is not, but that's superficial for me)

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Tryton's fork was motivated by disagreements on the technical and business directions.

1/ On technical side, both leaders had very different directions on lots of different details. The main one being: Odoo moved to the web, Tryton was attached to the GTK/rich client.

2/ On the business side (probably the biggest difference): Tryton had a purely community driven development approach (with an anti-commercial mindset of his initial community) and Odoo's goal is to build a great open source product but sustain that with a strong business model (for partners and Odoo Inc).

The Tryton founders were 2 ex-employees of Odoo back in 2008 before the fork. Odoo had 5 employees at that time. (66% of the devs left to work on a fork :)

To discover Odoo:

- Start with these intro videos: https://odoo.com/page/tour

- Test online on: https://odoo.com/start

To try Tryton: http://www.tryton.org/download.html

To try Odoo: https://odoo.com/start

Note that there are also medical apps on Odoo. GNU Health started as an Odoo Projects, some of their leaders moved to Tryton and others continued on Odoo. We deployed Odoo is several hospitals, and 3 of the top 5 medical NGOs worldwide run Odoo.

Disclaimer: I am the founder/CEO of Odoo.

Beside other personal considerations, the main motivation was that we wanted to improve the quality of the codebase ( especially the data-model). There was no time and no wishes for that at the time, so we decided to leave TinyERP (the former name of OpenERP/Odoo) and do that ourselves.

(I'm one of the Tryton founder as you may have understood)

To be more precise about Tryton differences, it has both a desktop and a web client. About the "anti-commercial mindset", indeed it is that the Tryton community does not allow lock-in mechanism into the project (at the opposite of Odoo with the business model of paying updates to new versions). But also it does not place a commercial entity as the center of the project but instead a non-profit Foundation. "Odoo's goal is to build a great open source product", this is also the goal of Tryton project but everyone is free to choose its business model.

Disclaimer: I'm a Tryton developer.

I implemented Odoo ERP's MRP capability for a supply chain stretching from Norway to Shenzen. It worked really good and we god transparency in our manufacturing process. We spent a lot of energy in making our production staff update the ERP as each phase of production was finalized, but in the end it was highly worth it. End result? 0 spreadsheets, almost maximum transparency. Improved Quality Process in production, more collaboration et cetera.

We also got a lot of value out of the other modules that almost magically comes out of the box :).

Completely unrelated to the ERP of course, the company is now out of business, but the website still remains http://bergesolutions.com

I'm genuinely curious - what is the feature parity like between Oodoo and SAP?

We made this feature by feature comparison with SAP BO (not R/3): https://www.odoo.com/page/compare-odoo-vs-sap

And all our comparisons whitepapers are here: https://www.odoo.com/fr_FR/page/odoo-white-paper

For all it's bloat and crappiness one thing that SAP provides is end to end process management. Want to process the bill with your banking provider and have that included in your tax returns automatically and plan the freeing of a bed with the emergency control room? Well SAP will do that (at a price and with consultancy). That's why SAP is what it is.

It works, but at a cost

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