[Vtigercrm-developers] YetiForce 0.0.3 and other forks

[Hamono, Chris (DPC)]

Thanks Sreenivas

Hi Chris,

The open source version is the best advertising you can get for the OnDemand version.

+1. We see it the same way. On Demand success rides on the strength of the open source version.

So why is it the poor cousin? (see below for the 6 month release cycle comments)


But, looking at the other side of the coin, we see that On Demand product development is boosting our open source forward.

Absolutely. It gives you real world experience. But then so does this mailing list. You get to see the issues people have here as well.


CRM is only a tool. Lot else goes into making it beneficial for a business. With On Demand a lot of our time goes into helping customers with implementations. During this process, we found that we need to make the UI simpler, and brought those enhancements to 6.0 version of open source. The quest for simpler UI is an ongoing exercise. For example, in 6.1, you see that lists now have a easy search boxes. Many of these enhancements are coming from the On Demand engineering work.

In this statement you are treating OnDemand as separate from vtiger. This is very telling. On demand is therefore a private fork of vtiger.


Vtiger open source has a lot of features already from workflows, to reports, to role-based access control, to inventory management to project management. We are focusing on improving the usability of these.

Many people cannot use the OnDemand version, for example us, we are a government agency that hosts sensitive information.

We will continue to invest in APIs and developer resources to make Vtiger CRM open source the platform-of-choice for on-premise installations. Over 20,000 hours of engineering work has gone into 6.0 and 6.1 versions. We are excited about the open source future. Today, we made our mobile apps free for iphone and android, both for open source and on demand users.

It is very obvious the open source version of VTiger sadly lags behind OnDemand in both features and fixes....While I can understand the idea behind running 2 different versions I believe the logic is flawed, and this is why...

I commented on this in earlier posts. On Demand gives us the luxury of deploying weekly updates. With open source, releasing a version once every 6 months is  too much to handle for clients since upgrades are a delicate task. We still try to release once every 6 months and include all bug fixes that are available from on demand.

I am sorry but this statement is clearly wrong. It is probably the basis of the discontent in this list.

All the active opensource projects I have been involved with have a nightly build. Using git (and github) it is very easy to have a master stable branch and then versions and nightly builds.  Or in your case weekly builds

There is absolutely no reason to have the open source version lag behind and missing the features of the OnDemand version. This would appear to be a commercial decision which I would say ignores my comments about what drives markets. What you are also doing is increasing your own workload. It would appear you need to backport the OnDemand changes to the open source codebase. This double handling must be expensive.

I don't disagree that there should be major releases. And with these more care should be taken, but for developers like myself and others on this list a nightly (weekly) build would be far more beneficial. This build should be in line with OnDemand not the poor cousin.

When it comes to releasing new features to open source, our approach is to enable a marketplace where clients can get features that are well supported by their developers. We will continue to bring core platform enhancements to facilitate new feature development.

And what happens to the marketplace if those developers are unhappy? They cannot sell enough of their product because the OpenSource version is substandard?

Regards,
Sreenivas

I can see in your response the careful thought out process of protecting your commercial interests. It reminds me of the time many years ago I did battle with a group of hackers. They were intent on breaking my software. It was a game we played and I conversed with them on the newsgroup devoted to hacking my software.

They said something that made me think and changed my outlook on software development. They said "For us hacking is a sport. We will never buy your product, So why are you wasting time trying to stop us from hacking it"

They were right. The time I spent combatting them would have been better spent on improving the customer experience. Sadly I was instead diverted by the challenge of defeating them.

You have the same combative attitude as I had. It would appear to me that you think open source developers and users have to be controlled otherwise you will lose your competitive edge.

This is wrong and ignores my previous comments on effective marketing. By harnessing the power of the open source developers both your OnDemand and Open Source versions will move forward much faster and your own sales will increase.

I appreciate the need to "do it my way" but the other cliché also rings true "Don't cut off your nose despite your face"

Chris

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 6:44 AM, Hamono, Chris (DPC) <Chris.Hamono at sa.gov.au<mailto:Chris.Hamono at sa.gov.au>> wrote:

SNIP

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