Why did not we answer?

Over the past years, a small group of 5 companies (all from the Tryton community) used to influence perception on OpenERP by disseminating negative and dubious or false information. They have tried to grow frustrations on OpenERP for their own interests. All the big FUD you will find on the web come from the same guys, e.g.. OpenERP is not open source, OpenERP only think about marketing, OpenERP does not work for...

We do not want to enter in such a flame war, so we used to ignore them. You can not have a real discussion with such people whose sole intention is to bash OpenERP. Every attempt to answer them would just be:

1. an opportunity for them to re-answer and bash even more
2. an opportunity for them to get more visibility.

About the Sorry OpenERP campaign

The SorryOpenERP campaign is not a result of the community as claimed. It's the initiative of one company; Openlabs. They used to launch big FUD on OpenERP. The author of the website is Sharoon Thomas, the CEO of Openlabs as well as 2 other employees of Openlabs: https://github.com/sorryopenerp/sorryopenerp.github.io/graphs/contributors

Get the Facts

OpenERP is not perfect and has several weaknesses we work on. But it's by far the best open source management software in the world; technically and functionally. You can compare with other open source players; http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=openerp%2Copenbravo%2Ccompiere%2Cxtuple#q=openerp%2C%20openbravo%2C%20compiere%2C%20xtuple&cmpt=q

Here are some facts about their statements; (I just quoted the title of their sections)

100% Open Source (That’s a Joke)

OpenERP is fully open source (and will always stay), just check our AGPL licence. We have always been clear about our open source commitment. http://bit.ly/openmodel

They quoted one of my tweet in 2010 "OpenERP will always remain AGPL." with the following quiz "Why did the CEO of OpenERP delete this tweet?" They proposed the following options 1/ He lied. 2/ He was scared. 3/ Hypocrisy.

I have to say I don't remember why I deleted this tweet (probably because I posted twice the same tweet and deleted one). But for sure, OpenERP is still AGPL.

Hated by millions worldwide

The most hated products are also the most famous ones, just because their audience is larger. (Apple, Microsoft, ...) So, I guess they are probably people that do not like OpenERP; but I am amazed every day how people like OpenERP so much.

Note that they quoted people that like OpenERP (they took the tweet out of their context)

The overall satisfaction of OpenERP users and customers is very high compare to industry standards; we have a churn <15% on our customers which means that a customers stays on average 6.5 years on OpenERP. And I am pretty sure this will increase even more with v7.

We are the most used open source management software (>1M users); you can not get such KPI without a great product and service.

OpenERP’s thousand plus applications exist along with equivalent or more number of bugs. With consistent complaints about the functioning of OpenERP and the creators trying to cover the existing problems with novel features, this software is a repository of flaws.

Our OpenERP Enterprise service includes an unlimited bugfix guarantee. In other words, we fix all bugs reported by customers at no extra costs. Bugs reported are closed in an average of 5 open days. We think we can do better but it's already good (try to submit a bug to SAP or Ms. Dynamics).

This is a good proof that:

• We are confident in the quality of the software
• If there are too much bugs, it costs us more money, not to the customer

All fixes are ported in the stable branches so that every one can benefit from it.

their corrupted business model.; The more apps you install, the more your process becomes complicated with increase in maintenance costs.

Our OpenERP Enterprise maintenance offer is a fixed price (35 EUR/user/month) independant from the number of applications our customers install. As an opposite to all others software, with OpenERP, you don't have to pay more in the maintenance contract if you install more apps.

We also do our best to improve OpenERP to make it easier versions after versions. Just check the difference between version 6.1 and version 7 on http://runbot.openerp.com

Only 15 days are free of cost You will end up paying maintenance costs forever

OpenERP is fully open source. You can download it for free and use it unlimitedly without being forced to buy anything at any time.

The 15 days free trial they are talking about is just for the cloud offer; if you want OpenERP SA to host and maintain the software for you.

We also have a maintenance service offer where we can guarantee unlimited bugfixes and migration at a fix price. It's not mandatory, but it's a great service; OpenERP is the only publisher in the world that allows customers to upgrade at no extra costs as part as their maintenance contract.

You can not imagine how much SAP or Ms. Dynamics customers I saw that were stuck in old versions of the software and for whom the upgrade is as expensive as a full implementation. We do not want OpenERP customers to be in this situation. We are convinced that it's great for customers to evolve with the software, that's why we launched this service offer.

Memory and CPU Leaks OpenERP is incapable of running large applications as their ORM is ineffective

A few facts;

• Every OpenERP cloud server has 1000 instances running in parallel; we never had to restart one of these for CPU or memory leaks. (we had some issues related to memory leaks in v6.0 but it's fixed since 2 years)
• My father stopped his auction house business 2 weeks ago. I stopped his OpenERP server that has been running without interruption since 7 years. (one of the oldest OpenERP user)

OpenERP can be a roadblock in the growth of your business as it is incompetent of handling large data applications, so if you are dreaming of increasing your business with OpenERP, you can kiss goodbye to that dream

• The biggest OpenERP instance has 300.000 users

Only a very few software in the world can scale like this. Here is their success story: https://docs.google.com/a/openerp.com/file/d/0B5BDHVRYo-q5WGk4NHVCY1NOVlU/edit

Only one module out of the 250 official modules needs improvement for performances on high volumes, it's the stock one. We are rewriting it from scratch in order to fix this for version 8. More information here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jTLZJNV14saRn1VeZt_wME18YizEnEHB9ZX97WSqavs/edit?usp=sharing

Insecure by Design OpenERP uses clear text method to store passwords

The default communication protocol depends on how you configured the web server (apache or ngnix). On all our installation, we use https, even on our website; https://openerp.com So, communication are all crypted by default.

The default password method for our online offer is OAuth. (over https) --> secure and crypted

For on premise installations (if you download yourself), we do:

• OAuth by default for portal users
• Clear password for employees but you can just activate others methods in one click; LDAP, Crypted password

Community Driven Development (My Ass!)

They used slides from Raphaël Valyi, explaining the new data model for contacts/companies in version 7 is wrong. Some community members did not understand the change we did when we launched version 7 (probably due to a lack of communication from our side). It was a huge community discussion a few months ago.

Today:

• everyone agrees that the model we did is the right one
• even the author of these slides changed his mind and abandoned his branch to use our model

The quest for wealth has been the downfall of many empires and it seems that OpenERP is pacing towards its end. By charging for migration between two versions and high-cost customisations, it is clear that the creators of OpenERP are only looking to fill their coffers and not provide value. Perhaps, they have forgotten the first rule of business, ‘Customer always comes first’ or they could be blinded by the sight of Benjamins.

We, OpenERP SA, do not charge services to develop customizations. We do not have such an offer; it's not part of our core business model. Developing custom modules is usually done by partners and partners charge the price they want for this service. (we take no commission on such a service) The customer is free to choose the partner that better suits his need. So, it's fair for every one.

We do have a service to upgrade, it's OpenERP Enterprise; https://www.openerp.com/pricing Having a service offer to allow customers to upgrade their application at very low prices his actually a great offer for customers. It's just a great service offer, not a constraint; nothing forces users to purchase our services.

The leaders of OpenERP stated the company was open to an acquisition and since then their mission has been aligned to the intention of being bought by companies positioned in the leaders quadrant.

I am the main shareholder of OpenERP (>70% of the shares). And I always stated the opposite.

Their efforts show that they are aimed at driving up the stock value of the company so that they entice a major company for a takeover. The hype around the lunch module is a clear depiction of the moron driven development.

We use OpenERP to manage our company. That's why we developed the lunch module; we just needed such a module for ourself.

its creators are trying to hide the imperfections under their grandeur marketing campaign

We actually have nearly no marketing investment on OpenERP. OpenERP SA's turnover is $10m and the marketing budget is 100k$ per year. (1%, which is way bellow industry standards) This barely covers the cost of events (like the community meeting) and limited efforts in communication like our news.

Marketing is actually the biggest weakness of OpenERP and we will invest in this area in the future in order to grow the OpenERP business.

Collecting critical information without permission

OpenERP has an alert mechanism to retrieve security updates and alerts for end-users. We use this for two reasons:

1/ Get security alerts in order to show possible updates to the admin user. 2/ Check number of users according to OpenERP Enterprise contracts

Nearly all high-end open source software have such a mechanism:

• drupal: http://2we26u4fam7n16rz3a44uhbe1bq2.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/091712_1513_DrupalSecur1.png
• wordpress even publish its stats based on this: http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
• Google Chrome use the same mechanism to auto-update periodically (to know if there are updates available)

It's very important for every software publisher to know its number of active users and have a system to warn users in case of security fixes available through an update.

No sensitive/critical information are sent to OpenERP, everything remains anonymous. The only information are the version, the number of users, the contract version if any, and the database ID. There are no information related to the company, the users, the employees, the invoice, or anything else.

One can easily desactivate this by unactivating the related cron. (just one checkbox)

In the future, we would like to use this to publish real time statistics like wordpress do. It's important that the OpenERP community can track the progress of OpenERP. (two information only: number of instances in production, number of users)

How will we react

Such a campaign to bash OpenERP is just pitiful and, usually, I prefer not to waste too much time on such flames. But we got several requests from partners and users to take action.

So, we will take legal action against Openlabs to protect the reputation of our developers, our community and the business of our partners.