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Re: Licence question: using AGPL and Odoo proprietary modules on the same server

Re: Licence question: using AGPL and Odoo proprietary modules on the same server

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Re: Licence question: using AGPL and Odoo proprietary modules on the same server

by
InitOS GmbH, Frederik Kramer
- 12/09/2025 21:06:31

Hi Raphael,

as always very detailed and very insightful thoughts. Honestly, i can't add much value here than just saying you are right with all you said in my opinion. The 20/80 relation for LGPL/AGPL sounds quite reasonable (even if Pareto edges almost always apply).

I'll take the fear / discomfort of Pedro (and Enric) very reasonable, so instead of doing to much to fast, I would suggest to start with a controlled experiment (that even Pedro and Enric would be willing to agree to). 

The experiment could look like as follows:

Take a small, but prominent baseline or infrastructure module that we know or assume many people use (even many in illegal ways (just like Tom pointed out) as of today) were a solid majority (of OCA members) and the whole responsible PSC believes would be better if it were licensed under LGPL (or at least has no objections). Lets the responsible owners induce the license change from AGPL to LGPL, advertise this change, make an effort to publish and post about the module, the change and its useful usage, encourage to actively contribute...

and than measure diversity, total amount, quality of contributions, speed of migrations etc. for that very module over a longer period of time (+/- 1 year) and compare it with the AGPL population of similarly reasonable baseline and infrastructure moduls licensed under AGPL. 

That way we can easily test hypothesis without taking much risk. If the most supported hypothesis (i.e. some few baseline / infra modules LGPL, 80% business logic modules AGPL -> induces more adoption / contribution) we should see first supporting data from that experiment.

Best Frederik

Am 12.09.25 um 17:23 schrieb Raphaël Valyi:
Hello, I think I need to share how I see the big picture.

But first, let me exemplify again with an Odoo market I know very well. You may know that OCA/l10-brazil is the most active OCA repo (14k commits, 4000+ PRs, 150k lines of code, 70 contributors). Not because Brazil is an ERP eldorado but exactly because it is often pointed as the hardest ERP market (you need 200+ tax fields on an invoice line, a company doesn't use all of them but certainly some 60-80, a diversity of 80% companies use may be 180 of them. Same thing e-invoicing has 800 fiscal fields and is over SOAP...).
Well there are now 50 official Odoo partners in Brazil, I'm pretty solid, the large majority is a scam of disposable noobs (half life = 1.5 year) who believed it was just about reselling Odoo EE. The vast majority just fail their projects like lemmings (they call us later) as soon as they venture outside of CRM or project management. As I follow the Github notifications I can guarantee you these 50 partners never contributed a SINGLE PR to the OCA. In fact it seems only people unable to do a line of code or use Google to get an overlook would partner. So the selection is pretty inverted (Dunning Krueger)... Instead, aside from Akretion, you now have Escodoo and Engenere who are serious people, CE only, and contributing many PRs to the OCA (outside of OCA/l10-brazil as well). But when I read this from Quartile https://www.quartile.co/en_US/blog/odoo-bits-pieces-1/essential-criteria-for-selecting-your-odoo-partner-as-an-end-user-company-120 let's say it matches my experience.

I also know the French market very well as I pretty much started it 15 years ago (remember openerp.com used the open source ERP whilepaper I wrote at Smile on their frontpage for some 3 years). And I can tell you the quality of the official partner network dropped a lot. 10 years ago they were a well intentioned elite (before Odoo turned it into a "market for lemon", and now, aside from a few exceptions they are mostly a scam, mediocre at best. Less than 5% of these French partners contribute PRs to the OCA on a yearly basis...

Overall, I feel Odoo is doing an unassumed transition from an innovative customizable ERP framework to a SaaS product. In fact they grew a bubble since the start. Since they had to rival with the $ 20 millions inflated Openbravo bubble, continuing with their 10x exaggerated SaaS business model from 2010 for Sofinnova (Fabien shared it with me, as the 2nd partner on the American continent, I helped convince Sofinnova, I protested to Fabien it was inflated but kept quiet as he suggested). Then came the "sorrySAP" crap in 2013, the invention of the millions of happy users worldwide, the $ 500 millions secondary market investments...

Odoo themselves raised little money (on the primary market), less than $ 15 millions I think. In fact, since the start that is the partner network who fueled the growth. Then Odoo "pivoted" and dumped the "stupid partners who believed in that free software concept", made all the impossible early cases possible, did a crazy R&D... Remember that the 1st TinyERP web client didn't come from TinyERP themselves but was a 3rd party contribution (by Axelor)...
In a way Odoo externalized the cost of the bubble to its partner network: "sign your project with the latest noob Gold partner who paid for its status and it will be like you will be doing your project with an Acsone or Akretion engineer with 10+ years of Odoo experience". Pretty much what they sold before Odoo EE was a product in itself...

It worked for a while. It grew in quantity while dropping in quality. This is exactly what is called a "market for lemon" with a quality converging to zero as it was shown by Nobel laureate George Akerlof
At the same time Odoo has been improving its product a lot that is very True. Odoo is now quite well coded and is even pretty solid.

Finally, I think Odoo is in the middle of a transition: It is very likely Odoo Enterprise succeeds as a limited SaaS product for micro-companies (like Salesforce, Netsuite). Success will obviously depend on the country. And I think it's quite nice if they meet this success while funding the Odoo CE core under the LGPL license. Much like Basecamp or later Shopify funded the Rails framework.

What I find very "questionable" in fact is that they use the money from these partners they are fooling and their own customers to fund their transition toward an unassumed double agenda of a SaaS ERP for micro-companies. Indeed, Odoo will never assume the average quality of its partner network is crashing to zero.

But this is my vision: yes the partner network will stick to a very low quality for years and years (read again the implacable mechanics of the Market for Lemon) to come and an Odoo Enterprise code and license which is not designed for customizations or extensions but solely to protect the Odoo own IP.
And no, I don't see a bright future for this ecosystem of EE partners so that's why I suggest the OCA don't fool itself too much into trying to accommodate with the Odoo SA business roadmap.

And finally, while I said all this, I do share the concern that AGPL is a bit business unfriendly and I do agree we need some LGPL in the OCA to make it easy for companies using Odoo+OCA to protect some of their IP.
What is a good mileage? I don't know, maybe 20% LGPL and 80% AGPL would be nice.

@Tom:
About dual licensing again: it should be an opt-in option for the module authors but not forced otherwise you are simply hijacking the AGPL projection the modules authors might expect.
And also, the OCA will never be able to check if some business is using a valid LGPL exception module they purchased from the OCA. This simple fact would make it possible the AGPL would be violated massively meanwhile.


Thank you if you read it through ;-)




On Fri, Sep 12, 2025 at 1:57 PM Stéphane Bidoul <notifications@odoo-community.org> wrote:
Pedro,

Please don't assert things you can't possibly know about how other companies operate and why.

Best,

-Stéphane

On Fri, Sep 12, 2025 at 3:32 PM Pedro M. Baeza <notifications@odoo-community.org> wrote:
So you have provided the perfect example for confirming the hypothesis that going LGPL, the number of contributions will be reduced: how can it be that Tecnativa, having only 10 persons, contributes 4x more than companies like Camptocamp/Acsone, that have 40/50 persons?

They develop on top of enterprise modules, which they can't share, so they don't contribute to OCA.

They develop more private things, as they are allowed due to the license being LGPL, so they don't contribute back to OCA.

And again, remember the big vendor lock-in you are imposing on your customers installing enterprise modules, being the vendor Odoo S.A., not you. And even not advertising that to your customers (by ignorance or complacency). That's the big win of Odoo doing that the conversation doesn't turn around this.

Regards.

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--
Raphaël Valyi
Founder and consultant

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Dr.-Ing. Frederik Kramer
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