These companies will happily take the goodwill and source contributions that come from being open source and then eventually try to monetize by abandoning their open source license.
All the decisions we took have never been influenced by VC, or a goal of large returns. Quite the opposite: we always execute for the long term (e.g. growing the community), rather than short term benefits.
Our decisions are based on good balance between the good of Odoo Community, and the financial sustainability of the company and partners.
There is no way we will abandon our open source product. To guarantee that on my own, I kept the majority of the shares. (and I work for the project, not the money)
For years, we have had people thinking we will abandon the open source community. But we do that since 15 years now (first VC invested in 2010), and we continue investing massively in our open source version. (Typically, we try to keep a ratio of 80% of what we do is open source, 20% is Enterprise)
Explanation of our model here: https://www.odoo.com/blog/odoo-news-5/post/odoo-community-en...
every of those decisions are speaking against what you just said.
One can then imagine that the competitive edge of this new software is subsidized by their customers' developers who contribute the modules needed to cover corner cases (like addresses in Japan, those are hard!).
I agree with your point in general (Gitlab, for example), but this kind of software lives in an enterprise bubble which in my experience has much less 'true' open source behaviors anyway. If this model works for anyone, it's enterprise.
They aren't hard but indeed easy and very logical. It all started with the Chinese system of starting with the largest geographical entity and going to the most specific one [1]. Later its adopted both in Korea and Japan. It's been the same for dates Year-Month-Day (largest, smaller, smallest). There is no confusion whether it's DD/YY or MM/YY. Funny enough the currency symbol for Yuan and Yen is same character (¥).
So if you understand Chinese, Korean or Japanese language the systems are same.
In Japan the addresses start with the largest geographical entity and proceed to the most specific one. [2]
[1] https://eastasiastudent.net/china/mandarin/postal-address/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
- Some building have one or more entrances or various sides of the block. Knowing the block does not give you any information on how to enter the building and so you basically just have to know the building you're going to or use maps/directions. In Western countries the number on the street is the main entrance of the building in most cases
- Building names are often foreign in the downtown areas and can be confusing for locals + nonlocals to interact about. For example, pronouncing "Bienvenu Mansion" with my American accent can be confusing to the Japanese due to their particular Katakana readings of foreign words.
My original point isn't very strong because in computing that isn't an issue since it's a problem for time of delivery or arrival, but I was just highlighting one random complexity of which there are millions globally that these ERPs need to handle.
Even in Europe each place has their own way of address e.g. an Italian address will be different from a Swiss, French or a Belgian address system.
ERP's are able to handle it for many years this complexity, now we should be able to make it easier.
But if we look at some open source foundations, they are pretty much that (but usually in a non-profit form, why would that be? /s).