Episode: 4444
Title: HPR4444: Introduction into the E.R.P. application called Odoo
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4444/hpr4444.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:45:53

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4444, for Thursday the 14th of August 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Introduction into the RP Application Called Udu.
It is hosted by Jaron Baton, and is about 25 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, in this podcast I give a small introduction into the
RP Application Called Udu.
Hello everybody, this is Jaron Baton again.
If you haven't heard of me, I can imagine, but it's been a little over a year since I
made, I recorded my last podcast for HPR, and I got to talk with one of the
generators, and well, he made a suggestion that I do a few talks actually about Udu.
So, that's what I'm going to do today.
This is more the introductory talk, so it's more sketching the landscape around Udu, so
that you get a feel of the application, and because it's an application, what it does.
And in subsequent editions, we'll dive more into the technical part of it.
But before you skip this one, you do need the introductory introduction to understand
what we're talking about.
So this podcast is based on a talk that I gave a couple of years ago, but I've updated
the numbers that I mentioned, so let's go ahead.
So open source enterprise resource planning, that's what we're talking about, and that
means that it's sort of an application that tries to manage everything within a company
from an administrative perspective, so that means invoicing the clients, but also getting
raw materials added that you buy, because basically a business means buying for less
and selling for more, and the margin in between, that's where you get your income.
If you do the other way around, you go bankrupt, it's easier than that.
But if you run a business, you get challenges.
So for instance, you need to do some text reporting, because every country has a text department
and every text department wants to know, what was your revenue, what was your profit
because we want the text, the shit out of it, and you can keep some of the money yourself.
That's basically the attitude, but when your company grows, you will maybe get employees
and they like to get the salary at the end of the month.
So you need some salary, salary, is that the word for it?
And the administration of it, in some countries, the pretty complex calculations made to decide
from the raw salary back to the net of salary that the client, that the customer, that
the employee gets.
Okay, maybe you want to do some project management, and because you do projects for a client,
and that means you have to assign one of your employees to do the project, and you want
him or her or whatever persuasion somebody is, you want them to enter data into some time
sheet, because every hour that they spend on a client, you want to build that client
for that.
Maybe you do logistics, and you want warehousing, and warehousing means that some of your
employees are working in the warehouse, and you get your orders from a sales process,
and that starts with a quotation, and when the customer says, yeah, this is a good quotation,
let's go ahead, I'll sign off on this one.
That means you have an actual sales order, and a sales order, will mean maybe somebody
needs to pick some products from the warehouse that will go into a box and be shipped to the
client, but if you pick stuff from some place in the warehouse, some position, that means
that you deplete your stock on this product.
So you need to be aware when you need to replenish your stock.
You see where I'm going, it all starts very simple, but it gets, every day, it gets
more complicated, and wouldn't it be nice if there was one application that understands
all of this, where you can do your quotation and your sales order, and your warehousing,
your stock levels, and your employee management, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, that's what they call an enterprise resource planning application, and one of those
is ODO, and it's spelled as ODO, so one O, then a D, and then two O's.
The company itself is based in Belgium, but we'll get into that later, a little bit
about me.
I've been into consultancy and open source consultancy specifically since 1998, so that's
the last century, actually, I'm getting old.
Thankfully I'm getting old, and I wrote some books on open source software, so I wrote
some LPI books on the Linux Professional Institute, I did some stuff with project planning,
with the Libro plan project, and I even wrote a book about ODO, I'm come to that in a
few minutes, so how did I get get into ODO?
Well, in 2018, I gave a talk at the Ubuntu conference, Ubicon, in Higon Spain, that's
in the northern part of Spain, and I gave a talk about mainframes, actually about how
to run a mainframe on your laptop for fun and profit, and the first time I did that actually
was in Sheffield at the ORCAMP Unconference, and somebody from HPR came up and said, well,
can you move that or record that into a podcast?
That was my first podcast for HPR, anyway, when I was in Spain in 2018, and I met a guy,
and he was a pretty fanatical user about ODO with his company, and he asked me, can you
write a book about ODO?
And well, we discussed that, and in the end, I started writing a book, and the book was
focused for startups, so well, in order to write a book, you need to learn the application,
so I installed it, I dove into it, and started learning ODO, and then I published the book
of self-publishing on lulu.com with the title Jumpstart Your Business with ODO version 12,
and currently it's version 18, so it's a little outdated, but can you learn from it?
Yeah, you can still can, but anyway, I digress.
So the book was published in December of 2020, so what does ODO do?
Well, I already described ERP application in general, and that's same thing, that also
applies to ODO, and actually, when you start a business, you should immediately start
using ODO, why you think, because all I need is a website, yeah, so what do you do if
you need a website?
Well, I will probably install WordPress, because about half the websites in the world
is WordPress, so it's got to be good, yeah, it's not bad, I have several WordPress sites
as well, but ODO also has a website functionality in it.
And if you start using WordPress, then at some point you want to watch your web shop,
and that means you need to have some e-commerce add-on, well, you can do WooCommerce or any
other plugin, and configure it, and maybe buy a license or whatever, that's possible,
but you are into the WordPress silo, so can WordPress do employee management?
No it cannot, can it do project management?
No it cannot, can it do, I don't know, customer relationship management, no it cannot, you
know what can, ODO, so let's go back to the first, so we start with the website, right?
You have your first business, you run ODO somewhere, you configure your website, you customize
it, the hell out of it, and you're happy, and at some point you say, I want e-commerce
to sell my products on my website, okay, so you just install the web shop functionality,
you enable the web shop functionality in ODO, and voila, you have a web shop in your website,
then if you grow and you need to hire people to work for you employees, then you enable
the HR modules, et cetera, et cetera, so you see where I'm going, it's sort of an all-in-one
solution that grows with your business, you don't need to use everything, because there's
so much in there, but you can use what you need, so let's say we started with a website,
and soon after that you want email marketing, so you gather, you put on your website, a text
block that people can enter, the email address, and you collect email addresses, and you
inform them of, I don't know, how your business is going, or new products that you're passionate
about, or services that you have done or started, or whatever, so you enable email marketing
functionality. After you've done that and you've sent out emails, at some point people will
come and say, yeah, look, let's discuss my need for whatever they need, and that's customer
relationship management, so you enable the ODO customer relationship management, and after
that they say, yeah, sure, let's go ahead and make this an order, so you have your sales
process, which means you enable sales functionality, which gives you orders after the order is fulfilled,
you send an invoice to the client, and you keep track of whether or not they pay that
invoice, and if they don't, you remind them again, or you send a really nasty person to collect
your money. After you've been getting paid for sometime, you need to do accounting on this,
how much did you spend on products buying in, how much did you sell, what your profit,
what your overhead, the building that you're in, or the server that you're hiring, or whatever.
You see what I'm getting? ODO does all that and more. Well, what is ODO? Let's talk a little
bit about the project history. Well, it started back in February 2005, which means it's now
a little over 20 years old, and at that time it started as a project called Tiny ERP, and it
was started by a Belgium guy called Fabian Pinkars, and Fabian Pinkars is still the CEO of this
ODO product. In 2008, they renamed Tiny ERP because it wasn't tiny anymore to open ERP because
it's still an open source, and they rebranded it to ODO to be a product name in 2014, so that's
11 years ago. If you want to have a look at the development, the main development repo is on
GitHub slash ODO slash ODO. One for the organization, first of all, ODO is the organization, second
one is the project, and the main company website is www.ODO.com. And it's a company that has
growth challenges. They are very popular, and on one side they know it, but at the same
time they are growing for good reason. It's a pretty good product. Anyway, so there are
two different versions. There's the community edition, which has the LGPL license, and the enterprise
edition, which is actually ODO property-tary license. Now, the ODO company makes its money from
the enterprise edition, nothing new there. And the community edition, you can download and install
for free. So far, so good. That's a simple story, so far. It gets more complicated later on.
If you use the community edition, well, the LGPL license, so it's got zero licensing fee, which
makes it pretty cheap, and since it does a lot of functionality, then the ratio of functionality
to price is pretty high. Enterprise edition starts at 25 euros per user per month. So if you
have your single user startup, 25 users a month, you have the enterprise edition. What's the difference
in functionality? Well, the community edition has a lot of functionality that you need to start
your business, but not everything. And ODO enterprise edition, of course, has everything for one single
price. And the enterprise edition is built on top of the community edition. So there's
extra code in enterprise edition, but it's on top of the community edition. So it's not
like they don't maintain the community edition or it's lagging behind. No, that's on purpose.
They've done this on purpose. They do maintain the community edition you have to because it's
the foundation of the enterprise edition. And that company has been growing in a pretty fast
pace and in an exponential rate, looking at the graph. And in 2024, they had 650 million
in revenue. So there are days that I don't earn that much money. So that's pretty much. And how
does this application work? Well, it's all coded in Python. So you can read the application
code. You absolutely can. And it uses postgres as a database. No, it's but whatever, that's
what it is. Every within within the application, it's sort of an app store where you in sort
of install one of the app one or more of the applications that are available to you. So every
app has its own sub directory. And every app has a underscore underscore manifest underscore
dot pi file that contains the name of the application. Well, app, the version number and it's
dependencies. So if you install, let's say, the sales app, then that has a dependency probably
on accounting because you need accounting to be able to do sales. So when you enable the
sales app, it will also install all the dependencies like accounting in your running's application.
And you can and the funny thing of the funny thing, the cool thing about an app, an Odo app,
is that you can think of it as an object itself. So you know, Python is object oriented and uses
objects that you can manipulate with methods and attributes. If you know all this stuff,
okay, great. But think about for a minute that you make an app as if it's an object which
means that an app can inherit from another app. So let's say, okay, there is an app that's
called contacts. So it's sort of a simple, it's an address book. That's it. And suppose
you want to start your business where people can bring their dog or cat to you because they
go on a holiday and they want you to take care of their animals for them. So the cats and dogs
they also have names and they have the address of where the bosses live. So it's sort of a
variation on an address book. So it's not the same as an address book, but it's similar.
So you can inherit the contact book address book, sorry, and then add or the disabled attribute
method widgets and reports to that. So some of the code you get for free and some you can add
yourself into a new app. So what do you get with community edition? Well, if you use community
auto community edition, you get more than 460 apps. So that sales is an app. Invoicing is an app.
Accounting is up to 460. But that's not all. There's also an odu.com app store where businesses
all over the world when they develop an app for clients and the client says it's not a
exclusive for me. They can put that into their app store. And last time I counted, there were
more than 35,000 apps in the odu.com app store. Now what's the general, the average price for one of those
apps? Sometimes it's 30 bucks, sometimes it's 100 bucks. But that's not really very expensive.
No. And then there's also another one that's the odu community association. So that's the user
foundation, foundation of users of odu. And they have an app store as well. So about 5,000. And those
are on average for free. Isn't that cool? And if you say, yeah, but this is to complicate it,
or I have a large business and it sounds pretty good, but I don't have the time to spare to learn
this application. No worries. There is an odu partner network. And last time I did this talk
that I'm using at the moment, that's three years ago. And three years ago, there were, let's see,
1,700 partners worldwide and currently that's doubled. So 3,445 business partners. So those partners
are companies that will help you to implement odu in your organization. On average,
they specialize on the odu enterprise edition, but some also support the community edition.
And your mileage may vary, but you can check with, well, in your country, there's a decent
working partner telephone book on the website of odu so that you can find. And back in
2022, there were some 8 million users worldwide and currently there are 12 million. So also that is growing
in an exponential rate. So what organizations are involved? Well, there is the odu company,
the company that makes the odu application. So there's odu s dot a dot. That's the name of the
type of business that they run. It's the best in Belgium. And the website, like I said mentioned
earlier, or www odu.com. And the other group is the odu users, people using the odu
application. There are also as an organizations involved in this application, but from a user perspective.
And then there's the odu community association, the OCA, which can be found on www.odu-community.org.
And these three groups, the users, the odu business, the odu company, sorry, and the OCA,
they form a sort of what I like to call a lover's triangle. Well, how does this work?
The odu company, odu, wants to gain as much odu users as possible. And that's their business.
So does the odu community association. But what you also see is that sometimes the odu community
association creates add-ons or one of the members creates an add-on that has really
really interesting functionality, and that's licensed in an open-source license.
And then other odu companies says, yeah, that's cool. Let's add that to the community edition.
So they get free research and development in a way. Next to, of course, the effort that they themselves
put into the application.
And sometimes the OCA, the odu community association, they look at the new release and say,
yeah, that's a funny new module that you've added there. But I think we can do better.
Or they build an add-on to this new module because they want, or somebody likes to have some extra functionality.
The real challenges is in the maintainability. But even that, they have pretty high standards
and have really figured this out how this could work.
So that's it for now. A small introduction on the odu ERP application.
And on one of the next podcasts, we will go into the installation and customization of this application
because there are some things you need to know and some of those are pretty well hidden.
So that's it for now. I hope you enjoyed this podcast.
And if you like it, please add a comment in the comment section.
And, well, see you next time. Bye-bye.
On this odu I status, today's show is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.