Episode: 3222
Title: HPR3222: Musings about writing a book about the Odoo software suite
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3222/hpr3222.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:06:04

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3222 for Tuesday 8th of December 2020.
Today's show is entitled,
using about writing a book about the Odo software suite.
It is hosted by Geron Beton and in about 27 minutes long and Karina Cleanflag.
The summary is how I started writing again after 20 years and this time about the Odo software.
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Hi guys, this is Geron Beton again with another story.
This one is about software, it's about Python in a way.
But it's also just a story, how things sometimes happen.
So picture this, I don't know if I've told you this before,
but I can't remember so I'll just tell you anyway.
That was the UBCON conference in the Northern part of Spain in 2018, so two years ago.
And I submitted a proposal to do a talk
about the Hercules mainframe emulator and I got invited so I did my talk there.
But I also met another Dutch guy, actually two of them.
And we started talking, turned out that he once had a very
pretty big company and he sold it all off and he was now into open source there.
He loved doing new and innovative projects with open source.
And so we started talking, it was a nice, nice conversation.
When I returned home about two months later, I got a call from him and he said,
listen, I want you to write a book.
Now he told me, would you be willing to write a book about O2?
Now what O2 is will come to that later, but this is first a preliminary story, right?
And my answer was simply no, because writing a book in IT is seldom
interesting enough to want all the effort. And if writing, if you want to do that as a day job,
you best try to write a best seller for the general public because then the number of copies
that are being sold is far out numbers the amount of copies sold if it would be a book on IT.
So I said, no, I declined his offer, but we started talking, but because
well, he knew I had written books before and I was a lovely chap and somewhere in the middle
of the discussion my wife, she's a project manager or was a project manager at the time,
she's now an IT manager, but she was a project manager at the time.
She said, yeah, but this is just a project and this is this this this other guy said, yeah,
yeah, it's just a project. I said, oh, well, are you willing to pay an hourly rate for me writing a
book? Yeah, sure. Well, that changes the story considerably. So we got to talk, start discussing that
and in the end, we found a middle ground that I could I would be willing to write a book frame
and my rate would be lower than usual because because why not? And I loved writing a book,
just that I couldn't, if this would have happened with another formula,
it just wouldn't have wanted the effort, but now it did. So we were in agreement and I started
writing a book. Okay, so this podcast and I'm now four minutes away already, but this podcast is
not about me trying to sell this book. Really, it isn't. This is just a podcast for HPR, like all the
other podcasts I've made. So if you feel like buying the book later on, be my guest. I mean,
who am I to decline that? But if you don't, really, no worries. This is just
where I wanted to share with you the sort of journey that I made during this project.
So I wrote, I wrote, I talked early on a podcast about writing books using Eski Doc,
so I will not repeat that because there are other podcasts discussing that.
But let's let's circle back to this. Oh, so what is that? Because that was the subject of the
book. Well, this is my my client wanted. He had sold his company, but his company was a business
that was in 30 countries, 30, 30, selling a product and everything was automated on the business
site with this auto software. And he was very, very strongly, he's very strongly felt that every
new and starting business and entrepreneur should be made aware of the existence of the software.
So everybody could start a business, use this software to automate everything in the administration
and logistics department. So what does Odo? Well, Odo started about 15 years ago. I believe
don't pinpoint me on exact numbers. And it started in Belgium and it started as open source.
That time it was called open ERP, open ERP. And it still is open source.
And it grew and it thrived. And by now, I believe they have some two million users worldwide.
So it's it's a pretty big ecosystem. And this company now has two versions of the software. And
that's Odo community edition and Odo enterprise edition. And for the enterprise edition, of course,
you need to pay. I mean, I understand that it's the business model. At some point in time,
the community grew so large that that became the need for an organization to sort of
manage and bundle the community. So that was the OCA, the OCA, the Odo community association.
And that got started a couple of years ago. And they started developing add-ons for the Odo
software as well, completely open source. Now, fast forward to today. You have your community
edition that has some hard-wired dependencies on functionality from the Odo company.
And so you can easily start with the community edition. But as soon, pretty soon, when you go
into the more advanced functionality, you get redirected to the website of the Odo company. And
they ask you to to subscribe to the enterprise edition, which I understand that they want to do
it that way. At the same time, on GitHub, there is a pretty huge repository of plugins and add-ons
created by the Odo community association that extends and sometimes replaces functionality of
the enterprise edition in the community edition. So if you mix and mesh the community edition
with certain add-ons from the OCA, you can have a very functional, very rich environment
and a cost of zero. And you also see that the company, the Odo company, understands
this ecosystem and they are always looking around to keep everything in a balance. So the
balance is where they have, of course, their interest in gaining revenue from customers,
understandable. And at the same time, they see the added benefit and value of an Odo community
association that promotes and extends the software. And sometimes, the really successful add-ons
from the Odo community association are, and since they are open source, are integrated default
into the community edition. So the request that I got was, can you write a book for starting
entrepreneurs that uses a recipe with the community edition and specific Odo community association
add-ons to get a system that is usable for a large amount of starting entrepreneurs.
And they had a list that I could use and I started writing and after a couple of months
because I was writing on and off with other projects intertwined. And at some point,
the job was done, the book was finished. I decided on the title, Jumpstart Your Business with Odo,
because I think that that sort of appeals to starting to beginning entrepreneurs.
And I also decided on, you know, the sentence that sometimes in software, it's like
eat your own dog food, right? So after I wrote the book, I decided that first of January
this year, 2020, I decided to use this for the administration of my own, very small company.
And so I've also been using it in a daily work. And I must say, it works.
The other thing is that my client is a Dutchman like I am. And he wanted the book to be at first
in English, so it could have a very broad audience. But you have to decide on a country configuration
for not the language, because you can easily change per user the language that you like in the
GUI. Now, you also have to decide, well, this installation or instance is geared towards,
let's say, the Dutch text law environment. So at the moment, we have this first edition,
this first book. So it's based on version 12. It's in English. And it is focused on a configuration
for use in the Netherlands, which I know it's just a random country in a way.
When now that this is done, I'm working on the translation of the book,
two Dutch, which should be easy for me as being Dutch. And at the same time, I'm looking around
for people who can help me and tell me what mix of Odo Community Association add-ons and modules I
need to support entrepreneurs in another country to also start using Odo. Because in Belgium,
France and Germany, they all have in a way different text laws. So I need people in other countries
that can discuss with Odo Community Association members in that country to come up with a list of
add-ons and modules that you need in that specific country to please mill me that information.
So I can also create a new edition in a way targeted to another country.
Now, you might think that that will make me a millionaire, but I will really and seriously
doubt that. But it's just that I think that this is a promising project. It's
this, it's relatively easy for me to create another version for a focused of targeted
another country. Because I use Git as a source revisioning and I use Eski Dock for the Eski Dock
tour, to be exact, for the source code of the book. So if I get a list for a specific country
of add-ons needed, I can switch the language to that language. I can replace the screenshots of
the modules that are generic. I can document the add-ons for that specific country and then I have
another edition for another country. And well, since you're listening to this, you're probably
a heck of just as I am. So I probably don't have to tell you that I'm not into this for the money.
It's just this is fun. Simple and plain fun to do and to write.
So if you feel inclined and you want to help out, please do so. I think it's clear what
what I would love you to do. I like you to do. If you don't, but you just find this interesting.
Okay, that's good enough. I mean, that was the main idea behind this podcast to tell you a
little bit about this software. Okay, what can it do? What does it until to automate your business?
Well, you have your contact list with all your clients and firms, both suppliers and clients.
You have a module for invoicing, which relates to products. You have a module for website. So you
can run your website from the same O2 application and they have a really, really fancy
website design module with blocks. Where you could say, okay, I want this block to be a text on
one side and a picture or another or I want only text or I want this title in specific size.
And you can even with a couple of settings, you can attach it to the unsplash.com website and
unsplash.com is a site with high quality license free. Well, there is of course a license,
but the license is you can use it like open source. You know, it's free to use of pictures.
So you can very easily integrate unsplash pictures into your website design and it's not like
the really, they're redirected to the picture on the unsplash site. No, they're downloaded. So
they're on your server and you serve them to your clients. There is a webshop functionality in
there. Basically, if you install the community edition, you get a sort of a blank canvas with
one application being the contact list because that's where you always would start with.
And there is the apps module. And in the apps module, you can install additional functionality.
And right out of the box, there are the, I'm not kidding you, 360 different add-ons to choose from.
With the, there's always a default search filter that sort of filters that. But if you remove that
default search filter, which is very easy to do with the click of a button, with a click of the
mouse, you get access to the 360 add-ons. And behind this in software, it sort of is like
if you install an add-on, this add-on can register itself, it can register the data it uses,
it can register the relation it has with other add-ons or modules. I'm still not sure how to
call them, but they are the same. Blocks of functionality would also be a good description.
And there are, they register themselves to the ORM layer and to the application of O2. So
it's relatively easy to extend functionality to mix and mesh modules. And it has an internal
dependency management system. So if you install, for instance, a webshop, that means you also need to
automatically invoicing will be installed as well. And products will be installed as well.
But if you are a small entrepreneur and let's say you're a headresser, you don't have much of a
stock that you sell, maybe a couple of products that fit on one shelf, you don't need a logistics
warehouse module, right? So you don't add that. But you do generate invoices or you use the
point of sale module because you have a shop. Or maybe you are self-employed like I am and you
send invoices on a monthly basis. Okay, sure, no problem. Or you have a subscription with a client,
with a monthly invoice for a specific amount. You enter that as a contract into O2 and it will
automatically invoice the client for you. You don't have to think about it twice.
There is so much functionality in there. And this client of mine, he is
at this moment, paying developers to create extra modules. And because he believes in open source,
all those functionality is simply released to the O2 community association and to the world.
And he is not the only one. So the ecosystem of functionality grows and grows.
If you want to interact with it, there is an O2RPC library that's Python because O2 is written
in Python, okay, with Post-CrestQL database. So you can import the O2RPC library and then you
can request information for the objects in the O2RPC. And you can add objects and
O2 will check if you are not doing something illegal well up to a certain point of course,
but pretty good. So you can hook it up to your own internal systems if you like.
So yeah, I've become pretty enthusiastic about the functionality of O2. It's an amazing
ecosystem of software that you can use to start a business or maybe switch if you like to.
And there is a large body of service suppliers that can help you out because I'm just a rider.
You know, I'm not the implementer. But yeah, this is fun to work with and to use even.
There is a CRM library so you can do your customer relationship management with,
if you're self-employed only, well, then you know your clients and that's easy. But if you have,
let's say, 10 salespeople, you need something to structure your sales funnel and it's all in there.
Yeah, a decent amount of reporting. You have default a number of visualization tools like graphs.
You can store popular report configurations for later use to later easily use again.
There is, well, there's a lot to play with. Well, maybe you don't have a business and you just
want to sniff at the software, you know, and get a feel for it. Download and install, use the
installation as described on the O2.com website and install the community edition. I play around with
it. And if you say, yeah, but I want to disconnect this and I want to disconnect it from the O2
company because there are some intertwined things. Yeah, then it's hard to explain, but yeah,
I would advise to read my book. But like I said, again and again and again, I'm not in,
I'm not right telling you this now as a sales pitch. I'm really not. It's just there are things
that you can't describe in a podcast. But there are certain OCA modules that will help you
in getting your instance not intertwined with the O2 company website. Okay.
And I have no problem propagating that behavior and that configuration because I think that at some
point in time, let's say when your starting business is grown and grown and grown at some point,
maybe you have 50 people working here and you're using the HR module and you're using the
time sheets module and you're using the project management module and you're using the expenses
module. And at some point you will discover that yeah, it's time to switch to the enterprise edition
and use one of the commercial consultancy firms O2 business partners to help you with the switch
and become an enterprise edition user. But by then you have a turnover that legitimizes
that switch. So it's all good and it's all in balance and yeah, yeah, happy. But I hope you
get the point that I'm making with this. If not, well, you know, if you have additional questions
or like to know more, just put a note in the comments and I'll respond to it with an extra episode.
I'll also put down the URL to the book in the notes. I can't stress this enough. This is not a
seal switch. It's just if you want to know more, there is a book available, but you don't need to.
You can also ask the question in the comments of the podcast and I'll make another episode. Okay.
So I hope you enjoyed me explaining this little gem of wisdom and knowledge.
And I hope you have a nice day and maybe talk to you again. Okay, bye bye.
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