@janneman, I think Fabien answered he still holds the majority of the shares on his blog: http://fptiny.blogspot.com/2010/02/openerp-raises-3-million-euros.html Knowing him, I think that's a very good guarantee the project will not be high-jacked by short minded business guys as mayè be Compiere has been. If Fabien was interested only in easy money, he wouldn't have made all that work, earning so little for the last 5 years, I'm pretty sure there is a part of honor in freaking with SAP and co at the end.
Now, I had those guys from Sofinnova on phone too some 3 months ago when they were investigating the partner network. Take it as you want, 3 Millions euros, is really not a big deal for an ERP that will rule the market in a few years. I mean, take it as you want: partnerships, Odoo, training, support, integration, at the end, there are plenty of combos to make that money back at the scale of a world ERP market. OpenERP is not a bubble, it's already effective in some situations, IMHO, it's all about generalizing that on a world market and they can make a ton of money while stiff offering a very competitive product, much like MySQL if you like. And that's not too risky either, if they pay attention to maintain the gap over Tryton (6 months release cycle please!), they are almost alone considering the tech and community gap the others will never fill any time soon... Now, yes, if that's not enough, they could certainly re-sell it, I'm pretty sure it will be enough for many... And should they play it wrong, the code is GPL, we fork, the guys who buys it manage to slow it down for some 2 years like Oracle on MySQL, but that's pretty all, after that it just rebirth stronger than ever. I also made that pretty clear to Sofinnova guys, that means, the liquidity of "OpenERP" is not huge: for instance if SAP tries to buy it, the fork is so virulent that it sucks up all the community in no time and SAP can't even invest a lot of money on such an ineffective defensive move. Now, if somebody like Google buys it, what happens? A large part of the community can stick with it (I would as if Google is still lead by the same guys), so it still weights a lot of value and everybody from the free world + investors are happy. I'm myself not too much concerned by that. I see it as a very positive and required move. On the contrary, I was much more concerned by how long Tiny would have to prostitute their brain on the integration market instead of doing the editor job which was starting to slow down all of us too much those last months compared to the rise of say Tryton or possible fork. I think they answered positively to all our concerns here. Now we will judge acts, lets wait a bit their teams get sorted out, at least they now have them with the right guys, so I'm quite confident it will make the required step forward in term of community catalyze. Again, well done considering the challenge! ------------------------ Raphaël Valyi CEO and OpenERP consultant at http://www.akretion.com -------------------- m2f -------------------- -- http://www.openobject.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=51357#51357 -------------------- m2f --------------------
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