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Comment by paxcoder | Hacker News Reader

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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