Comment 232 for bug 1160365

Maxime,

> What are your criteria for a change between 2 versions to be so huge (in
> terms of migration effort for the community) that you will not do it ?

I repeat myself:
- the change required to update community modules IS NOT huge

Adapting a community module to the new partner model is peanuts!
Really, please try it.

But I agree that it takes time to port new modules to v7, for plenty of
other reasons: new views, small changes in the processes, ...

> To me, with such change on every major release, OpenERP will never be
> stable and as the number of modules keeps growing, the migration effort
> for the community will be growing as well. We will arrive at some point
> where 8.0 will be released and not all interesting modules will be
> migrated to 7.0. What is your limit ? Migrating a module when you didn't
> make it yourself is painfull and time-consuming. Do you want to kill
> older contributing partners and community members ?

We seriously try to limit changes to the minimum required. But we need a
fair balance between "evolution" and "backward compatibility".

Just imagine this: if we would have applied a "no change" policy,
OpenERP would have been stuck in version 4.2. If we would have done
this, everyone would probably be out of business right now.
  -> To go from v4.2 to v7, we needed to change a lot of things.

Today, our competitors are solid and evolving. Just have a look at
salesforce (a new version every 6 months), new versions of Ms. Dynamics,
and SAP Netweaver...

We need to evolve if we want to survive.

> I think this is a side effect of your policy to bill for the migration.

Yes, we are the evil OpenERP SA:

 - we create bugs to sell more OpenERP Enterprise,
 - we make OpenERP become more complex to sell more trainings,
 - we create huge changes to sell more migrations,
 - we lie on our tests scenario to create noise so that people don't
   notice that we inject bad design in OpenERP,
 - we reject good merge proposals to make people angry... :)

> You have an interest to make that change so big that only your team can
> migrate a database. The community and customers don't share that
> interest.

No, porting a module to v7 is only a few minutes due to this change in
the model. It's not a barrier, it's not even an extra effort compared to
what you get with v7.

> Your company should take a deep breath, rely on
> the partners network to sell OpenERP Enterprise, take the time to move
> slowly but confidently and work in collaboration with the community
> members you want to work with. Going fast will lead you nowhere.

> Instead of investing time on lunch module (I guess it is there because you
>use it internally), you should focus on important features requested for
> years.

Oh yes, I forgot these...

The evil OpenERP SA:

 - waste time developing lunch modules because they like sandwich
 - don't understand the customer need because they never meet customers

Overall, everytime OpenERP SA release a new version:

 - the customer demand decrease
 - the pain to implement OpenERP to customers increase
 - partners loose more and more money on OpenERP every year

People prefer OpenERP v5.0 over v6.0, v6.0 over v6.1, v6.1 over v7.

I regret the old good times of version 4.2 :)

> If they asked for it, it means there would be companies switching
> to OpenERP. More companies use OpenERP, more companies will buy OpenERP
> Enterprise. We want to create the snowball effect. Today we start from
> scratch again.

Did you know that the companies deploying OpenERP in production nearly
doubled in Q1 2013 compared to Q4 2012 ?

It does not look like we start from scratch, it looks like the market
demand is accelerating and more customers want OpenERP...

> This discussion is just the visible part of the iceberg, and this is not
> the underlying problem.

It's always the same thing at every new versions (v5, v6.0, v6.1, v7):

- first 4 months: partners complain a lot due to changes (why did you
  do that?) or fears (this can not work, it was better before)
- then: they deploy it to customers and start to understanding/liking it
- then: when a new version is released, they want to stick to the
  current one.

Everybody complained when we launched v6.1. Today, nobody want to use
the v6.0 any more... It will be the same for v7 and it's the same for
every big technological change (GTK --> Web client)

Note that we decided a few things to improve the future:

1/ In the future, we will stop doing non-long term support version, to
avoid you the v6.1 difficulties (you have one year to migrate). So, v7
is a long term version, v8 and v9 will also be a long term version.
There will be no v7.1 or v8.1.

2/ As all versions are long term support versions, customers are not
forced to migrate to future versions. They choose if they want to evolve
or not.

3/ A guarantee that any customer can migrate all it's modules (including
it's own/community modules) for a very low cost: 800€/1000 lines of
code. We are trying to divide this price by 10 when we will be able to
share the costs amongst all the usres. Our goal is to be able to migrate
accounting localisation modules for 80 EUR (code+data)
That would be the best of the two world: being able to evolve and no
migration pain.
--> but that's for the long term... it's not feasible yet. But that's
the biggest service we can propose to our customers!

Thanks,

--
Fabien Pinckaers
CEO OpenERP
Chaussée de Namur 40
B-1367 Grand-Rosière
Belgium
Phone: +32.81.81.37.00
Fax: +32.81.73.35.01
Web: http://openerp.com