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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

Odoo's quest for monetization from open source has been a bit off-putting. I stopped using it a few quarters back due to that. Community and Enterprise are becoming too disjointed.

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I can't speak specifically for Odoo's quest for monetization because I'm not a user; it very well may not be a healthy one. But in general I think FOSS monetization should be celebrated. Successful open source software businesses are generally good for everyone except for closed source software businesses.

Is there something in particular that's flawed with Odoo's business?

You are correct that monetization need to celebrated in OSS software. This being said, when your open-source version is but a shadow version of the enterprise version, then you're doing something wrong. That's what op was hinting at. I'd add if you want people to use and promote your software, you also want to make sure the documentation is usable. Though regarding Odoo, I would say the situation is somehow better in this regard than it used to be a 5~7 years ago.

Thanks for the feedback. I've never used Odoo or OpenKoda, just read a lot about both and was impressed.

Sad to hear about Odoo's disjointed approach to enterprise monetization.

Hopefully OpenKoda takes note.

Point taken.

What would be a better approach?

Developers livings as monks and coding away in a dark delapidated castle surviving on their 4 donated cups of coffee a month while addressing 43,000 GitHub issues a month created by enterprise users who are working on commodifying the FOSS product into their cloud solution.

Yep, which is why all software is being locked behind cloud paywalls.

It's kind of a tragedy of the commons.

Base community and enterprise being at parity; clear distinction of enterprise features that don't break community.

In other words, community edition should work transparently to enterprise edition, so migration is simpler.

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