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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I'm a developer working for a company (which happens to work with the software mentioned in the article) and which pays me to write AGPL/LGPL licensed code. And I can assure you there are many similar companies around the world, usually not behemoths like MS or Google, yet writing business critical software for very large companies, often based on the cooperation that only FOSS allows.

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Where does is the money coming from? I'd like to know what business model the company you work for employs.

A company needs some kind of software that doesn't exist (or which is too expensive when they only need a subset), so we build it for them on top of Odoo. We also offer hosting, training, support, data migration, etc.

Note: while our software is FOSS, we don't publicly publish all of it, though our clients are free to do so.

"Note: while our software is FOSS, we don't publicly publish all of it, though our clients are free to do so."

That sounds like what I used to do with my trade secrets that I semi-publish. Enough detail out that hardworking specialists can build it. I'm curious what you mean by it though. Ive considered a model that sounds similar as I figured companies would be incentivized to keep paying anyway so updates/support have steady quality. Was worried about cloning, though.

Odoo is essentially a generic platform for which one writes modules, either self-contained or as extensions of others. When a client comes to us with a need, we implement a solution using a mix of new modules and existing ones. When it's finished, the client gets a FOSS license to all the modules, so they aren't locked-in to us. What we don't do is necessarily publish all modules on Github or similar; we make that decision case by case.

Interesting. Reminds me of a discussion here where so many FOSS projects were barely scraping by, overloaded with reauests from non-paying users. A few showed up to say simply: "tell them to pay you go build or support the feature if they really want it." Seems your company is playing it wiser than most. ;)

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