v5.2 is approaching

Hello,

The new version (5.2) is still under development under the trunk branch. Lots of new features have already been developed. It's time to propose your improvements for merging into the trunk branch. We plan to freeze the v5.2 in december / january.

This trunk version has lots of small improvements. The biggest changes are summarized here: https://launchpad.net/openobject-addons/+milestone/v5.2

Thanks,

Bloomberg talks about OpenERP

Bloomberg, the source of news and information that drives decisions that move billions of dollars every day in the U.S., talks about OpenERP. Click on the following link to get the article.

OpenERP and Electronic Invoicing

Thymbra just released an Electronic Invoice module for the argentina market. Today it has been tailored to work for the argentinian laws, but it should be very similar for other countries. At Thymbra they have been invoicing electronically for a year now. It's solid ! You can find it in the argentinian localization project in launchpad.

OpenERP and AGPL

Hello,

As requested by several partners and the community, we plan to change the licence of the next version of OpenERP to the AGPL (GNU Affero General Public Licence). Our goal is to better promote and maintain the free and open source nature of OpenERP. We think this licence will better protect the community to 'evil' SaaS offers that do not want to release their source code to the community.

The GNU General Public License (currently used by OpenERP v5) permits making a modified version and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public.

The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version.

Both the GPLv3 and AGPL are OSI certified and compatible together. We advice OpenERP contributors to develop their future modules in the AGPL licence. You can get more information on this licence on the FSF website:

• http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

You can contact fp AT openerp.com, for any question about this licence change.

We just made an analysis of the Open ERP visibility. The Open ERP expansion is exploding ! Here are the main figures:

• 20% growth in number of leads every 2 months (currently: 110 customers request per day)
• 1000 downloads per day of the auto-installer
• One new module produced every open day (20 per month)
  

The most interesting statistic is the comparison of the Open ERP visibility with current competitors. Let's take Netsuite (N), an ERP offer in SaaS which is probably the nearest competitor of the Odoo offer. In 2008, their annual expenses in Sales & Marketing operations was 80.000k€ ! The funny thing is that Open ERP just became most famous than Netsuite, according to google trends:


The annual sales & marketing budget of Open ERP is 200k€. It means Open ERP has the same visibility than a company having a marketing budget 400x bigger ! This is the power of a free and killer application !


More over, the sales and marketing are our weaknesses. Unfortunatly, we don't have such statistics yet on the developments, I let you imagine the figures :)

Open ERP's new continuous testing and integration server

We are proud to announce the release of our new testing and release control dashboard. You can check it in action here:

• http://test.openobject.com

The goal of this dashboard is:

• to be sure that everyone understands the way to contribute and share works,
• define the process for releases, maintenance and contributions,
  
• control the quality of the contributions automatically,
• propose a single point of entry to all Open Object's resources.

Bugs Detection

At each commit, our automated test framework automates:

• The installation of the modified modules on different environments,
• The launch of assert tests and demo data provided in each modules,
• The launch of unit tests provided in modules,
• The installation of all languages,
• The automated migration since v4.2, 5.0 to detect incompatibilities.
  

Our systems are testing the trunk and stable branches. We have builders for the quality certified modules, the addons-extra and addons-community ones. If one of the test fails, the quality team and the author of the bug will receive a report by email.

Quality Improvement

In order to continuously improve the quality of the code and to train contributors to do quality code, we also setup a quality testing framework. Each module are evaluated through a series of quality tests at each commit.

It performs a series of tests:

• Scalability: will the module rocks if you work with millions of record,
• Availability of tests and demo data,
  
• Guidelines: do you follow the Python or Open ERP guidelines,
• Security: availabilities of well defined rules,
• Quality of the code: non redundant lines, etc.
  

This is system is based on the base_module_quality module. We are looking for more tests, feel free to contribute and add your own tests in our system.

Documents

A series of slideshow have been made to explain how we propose to organise the community.

On Demand Open ERP just launched !

We are proud to announce the release of our cloud Open ERP offer: Odoo ! With Odoo, you can get a ready-to-use and complete enterprise management software in a few clicks. Odoo is based on the latest stable version of Open ERP.

Odoo is a complete offer at a unique and low-cost price:
* Open ERP Hosting with high bandwidth and servers,
* Incremental backups servers,
* Software + Infrastructure as a Service,
* Maintenance with bugfixes and automated migrations,
* Open ERP control center, etc.

The subscription to Odoo is free, you pay at the end of the month only if you are satisfied. With Odoo, you pay only what you really use, 0,60€ per hour. Odoo is free for very small companies.

For more information, please check http://odoo.com