As a proud American, today has a special meaning and I hope that as an American you can agree that our current "Two-Party System", is bad and could be fixed. It also reminds me of a very good OCA Days 2024 round table talk that I'd recommend to anyone currently working in the ecosystem, especially Odoo S.A. partners or OCA consumers.
How To Fix the US Elections
- Get rid of the electoral college and institute a popular vote.
- Ranked choice, aka ordering all options.
- Centralized web based software for voting.
I'd honestly say that both (1) and (2) are easier with (3), but I'm fine is we strike (3). But really, think about what a well designed "web app" could mean for elections. Voting stations can run the software with attendants to help out. The software can be optimized for making it easy to rank the choices, e.g. by repeatedly "picking your favorite" from small kanban like cards with candidates faces etc.
It really is that simple. General election reform could help with actually giving realistically viable candidates more of a platform, but these simple things can at least allow 3rd and 4th .. to n'th candidates to appear be ranked into the overall system.
How To Fix Odoo's "Two-Party System"
Finally something I may be qualified to speak on!
I think that there is a form of "Two-Party System", maybe "Three-Party" in some ways between Odoo S.A.'s Enterprise and the OCA's open source initiatives. Sometimes, people will add the app store, but I think we have all had some pretty bad misses at this point on the App store.
I have to say that if you listen closely to the aforementioned OCA Days round table, you will get a sense that everyone has problems with incorporating 3rd party code into their integrations. I know from personally talking with some additional partners that they will only use their own stuff, and usually reluctantly will agree that the OCA provides some useful modules. But everyone at the talk, and Hibou itself, maintain a layer of software ourselves. It sounds like some open, some closed and hosting supported, some app store hosting.
I think we should always be training on the latest things from Odoo itself, but also be willing to "cross the aisle" so to speak and look for solutions on the app store or from other well known partners. So today, I'd like to talk about how Hibou participates in the three (or more!) party system to what we believe is the benefit of ourselves, clients, and others willing to cross the aisle.
Open Source
For Open Source, Hibou maintains docker pipelines on Odoo but let me talk about what some of the pieces that go into building one particular repository can help you with running odoo in a container, and developing in odoo itself.
With blueprint2, you can easily bootstrap your own Odoo dev or runtime environment with essentially the only requirement being docker. By editing some config, you can easily upload this to a repo in gitlab and have it build your very own docker image that would be stored in your own gitlab instance or account. This gives you a complete runtime environment that you control the lifecycle and retention over, for nothing at all!
But it doesn't stop there, this relies on an Odoo image that comes from Hibou Odoo Suite, which includes some modules for free again. These include Hibou modules along with curated additional open source modules we find particularly helpful for most deployments.
This base image also comes with some general purpose functionality like a fully functional web-based IDE for editing Odoo code (and even running or interacting with a running instance of Odoo) from the Hibou Athene project. Athene itself is an opinionated dockerization of Eclipse Theia, but you don't need to know that, it just works (and for free again!)!
Additionally, containerizing things like major version upgrades, doing backups, restores and other database operations on the command line instead of http interface via the project Hibou Flow.
Additionally, and not in suite itself, a version of Openupgrade can be found that is dockerized based on those above Hibou Odoo Suite base images above.
Closing Remarks
So how does this all relate back to our current two-party system? Choice is important and we should all have enough options that we are able to be happy with the choice that is made.