We have been building and shipping business software for twenty-nine years. Nineteen of those were spent deep inside the Odoo ecosystem – as developers, operators, managed service providers, and from 2018 to 2025, as an official Odoo Partner. We are not writing this from the outside looking in. We watched from the inside as a once-compelling, genuinely open-source project gradually transformed into something quite different – and we decided we had seen enough.
This is not a rant. It is a reckoning.
Where It All Began – Fabien's Vision
You cannot understand Odoo without understanding Fabien Pinckaers. The Belgian developer prodigy founded TinyERP in 2002 at the age of 18 – an open-source ERP built around a single core principle: freedom. The idea was radical and simple at the same time: small and medium-sized businesses should have access to enterprise-grade software without being held hostage by enterprise-grade licensing fees.
Rebranded first as OpenERP and then as Odoo, the project was genuinely revolutionary. The partner-led model – where local businesses would implement, customise, and support end customers – painted a compelling picture of a decentralised, community-driven future. Fabien himself repeatedly emphasised that the system's strength lay in its community, in open development, and in the local domain expertise of its partner network.
That vision is what drew our team in all those years ago.
Where It Started to Go Wrong
In hindsight, the 2014 rebranding and the introduction of Odoo Enterprise was the inflection point – though none of us fully grasped at the time what it would eventually become.
The business rationale seemed straightforward enough: the open Community edition remains free, Enterprise covers the premium functionality. Nobody can reasonably argue that is inherently unfair. Development costs money.
The problem is not that Enterprise exists. The problem is what has happened since – quietly, consistently, year after year.
The Gradual Feature Drain
What was once Community is now Enterprise-only:
- Full accounting and financial reporting
- PDF report template editing
- Marketing automation
- Helpdesk, Field Service, Planning
- Studio – the no-code customisation tool
Any one of these could still be defended as a legitimate commercial decision. But the way it happened matters just as much as the fact that it did. There was no meaningful community consultation, no transparent roadmap. Features simply moved between editions, silently, version by version.
The Community edition has been progressively reduced to a lead generation tool – an instrument whose primary purpose is no longer to serve small businesses, but to funnel them toward Enterprise.
The CLA Problem – What Most People Don't Know
This is the least visible issue in the Odoo ecosystem, and arguably the most important one ethically.
Odoo S.A. requires every external contributor to sign a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) before a single line of code can be merged. It is a unilateral agreement: you assign your intellectual property rights to Odoo S.A., and they reserve the right to incorporate your work into their closed, commercial Enterprise product.
Let that sink in for a moment:
- A developer in good faith fixes a bug or ships a useful feature
- They believe they are contributing to the open-source commons
- Odoo S.A. takes that work – legally, under the CLA – and ships it in the paid product
- The contributor has no way of verifying whether their work was incorporated into the commercial product
This is entirely legal. The fact that it is legal does not make it right.
The open-source community has a name for this pattern: contributors effectively QA and refine a product that is then sold back to them and their clients.
The Partner Model in Practice – What We Saw From the Inside
Based on our experience as an official partner, Odoo S.A. operates as an extraordinarily aggressive, sales-driven machine. The primary KPI for Partner Managers (Account Managers) is New Monthly Recurring Revenue (NMRR) – the volume of new subscriptions closed.
- Their bonuses are directly tied to the number of licences sold and existing ones renewed.
- This creates a structural conflict with partners: the manager's incentive is to push customers toward as many user seats as possible, while the partner's incentive is to deliver a technically successful implementation.
Odoo takes considerable pride in operating one of the largest ERP partner ecosystems in the world. We were part of it. What we experienced on the ground, however, bore little resemblance to what the marketing materials described.
We experienced this conflict directly: our Odoo partner manager consistently pushed us to close more licence deals regardless of whether we had the delivery capacity to properly onboard and support those customers. Volume was the goal, not quality. Not long-term customer success – the quarterly number.
This is in direct conflict with Fabien's original vision, which centred on partner-led, locally expert, high-quality implementations. When the incentive chain rewards a partner manager for pressuring a partner, who in turn pressures their customers – the end customer is always last in line.
The OCA – The Community That Never Gave Up
The Odoo Community Association did not emerge by accident.
The OCA is an independent, non-profit organisation that develops modules under the LGPL licence – and it refuses to sign a CLA with Odoo S.A. That is not an oversight. It is a deliberate, principled stance. OCA contributors understand exactly what the CLA means, and they have collectively chosen to reject it.
The OCA today maintains over 1,500 modules with more than 200 active contributors worldwide. It restores to the community many of the features that Odoo S.A. has locked behind the Enterprise paywall. The OCA's work is, frankly, what keeps the Community edition viable for serious production use.
The integration of OCA modules is one of the cornerstones of eYssen's development – and we are genuinely grateful to every contributor who has kept that spirit alive.
What Finally Made Us Decide
In 2025, after 19 years in the Odoo ecosystem, we made the call: fork the Community Edition and launch eYssen.
Not out of frustration. Out of clarity.
What Fabien Pinckaers started in 2002 – a truly open, partner-led, freedom-first ecosystem – has evolved into a globally successful but fundamentally vendor-centric SaaS company. That may be a perfectly sound decision for its investors. It is very hard to reconcile with the implicit promises made to the community, to partners, and to customers along the way.
eYssen Is Not a "Souped-Up Community Build"
This is worth being clear about: eYssen is not an Odoo Community installation with a bundle of OCA modules dropped in. It is substantially more than that.
Close to 150 proprietary modules built from 19 years of real-world customer engagements have been integrated into the system's core. These are not solutions designed in a conference room – they were forged over years of solving actual business problems for actual customers. Where a solid open-source solution already existed – whether from OCA or another community project – we deliberately chose to integrate it rather than reinvent the wheel. That is the real power of the open-source model, properly applied.
The result is a coherent, well-integrated system that replaces the typical pain of assembling a "Community core plus a random assortment of third-party modules." Compatibility conflicts, version dependency hell, overlapping patches – we have already solved those upstream, so you do not have to.
We also strive to keep our core modifications compatible with upstream Odoo Community – meaning any standard Odoo-compatible module should work with eYssen. We cannot guarantee this at 100% in every case, but it is a guiding principle that shapes every architectural decision we make.
Open Source – Taken Seriously
eYssen is fully open source, with no proprietary core, no CLA requirement, and no hidden Enterprise tier. Every line of code is visible and auditable, and we actively encourage anyone to build on top of it.
Our business model is not built on code ownership – the code belongs to everyone, exactly as Fabien once envisioned. Our revenue comes from infrastructure (eYssen Cloud), professional support, and a small set of premium brokered services.
eYssen Cloud – Green, Fast, and Future-Proof
Our cloud infrastructure is something we are genuinely proud of. eYssen Cloud is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), running on ARM-based Ampere processors – the same architecture that underpins Apple's M-series chips. That alone translates to up to 50% lower energy consumption compared to conventional x86 deployments. The stack is Kubernetes-native (OKE), GitOps-driven (ArgoCD), with Redis caching, Cloudflare DDoS protection, and Backblaze for backup and object storage. Database management is handled by the CloudNativePG operator – and something we are particularly proud of: our eYssen fork currently runs on the latest PostgreSQL 18, which to our knowledge makes it the only Odoo distribution in the market doing so. Why that matters significantly for performance and reliability is a topic that deserves its own post. The platform scales horizontally with zero downtime, and developers get full browser-based IDE access via OpenVSCode Server alongside direct shell access to the running pod. Available across more than 40 data centre regions spanning Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East. The infrastructure stack alone is worth a dedicated deep-dive post. 😊
Professional Support
The second pillar is genuine, experienced support – not an anonymous helpdesk hiding behind a ticketing system. Twenty-nine years of hands-on ERP delivery experience backs every interaction.
Premium Brokered Services
What might look like an Enterprise-tier add-on – and yes, we understand the optics – consists exclusively of third-party services brokered and integrated into the platform: bank feed synchronisation, online printing solutions, PDF digital signatures, and similar capabilities. We pay the upstream providers; we simply deliver those services reliably and securely, natively embedded in the system.
And What's Coming Next...
A quick preview: eYssen AI is on the way – a fully agentic Odoo assistant that will fundamentally change how you think about ERP configuration and ongoing operations.
This is not a chatbot that answers questions. eYssen AI will be capable of guiding the entire onboarding journey: discussing your business requirements in plain language, then configuring and deploying your instance end-to-end. It can create custom fields, reports, and scheduled actions – no code required, driven entirely by natural language.
Our personal favourite use case? Schedule it to review your entire system weekly, identify operational inefficiencies, propose configuration improvements – and then actually implement them. 😄
eYssen carries forward the original vision that brought us into this ecosystem in the first place: openness, independence, and long-term trust – with our customers and partners alike.
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eYssen is a fork and enhanced distribution of Odoo Community Edition, purpose-built for the real-world needs of small and medium-sized businesses. Find out more at eyssen.com
Odoo is a registered trademark of Odoo S.A. eYssen is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with Odoo S.A. The views and observations expressed in this article are based on our own first-hand experience as a former Odoo Partner.
