Saturday, June 8, 2024

Today I had a video meeting with Hamza who gave me quick intro to the PoS module of Odoo. Oh yes, there is so much work to do in Lino! Most people might loose courage! But the answer is clear: Odoo is no free software, so it makes no sense to compare. It doesn’t even qualify as a candidate.

It’s sad to think that Odoo was free in its beginnings. Yes, as long as we don’t make sure that our software is forever free, sooner or later it will get jeopardized into a proprietary product because greedy giants have more power than those who care for everybody.

There is Tryton. I had another quick look at it. It seems to do well and they obviously have a better sales team than Lino. But my statement on this is the same as six years ago: We do Lino because we don’t believe that Tryton can replace Lino. Tryton is just a big application with plugins while Lino is a framework. Lino has some unique features and ways of doing things, which differ from Tryton, and I guess (but didn’t verify) that I wouldn’t be satisfied with other approaches. We know that we don’t know it, we just believe it. It would take months of research work to prove this. In case you don’t believe me, try to configure a Tryton site in a way that it has a chance to replace a Lino Presto or any other production Lino application of your choice. If you succeed, you might get me and the whole Lino team join the Tryton project (excerpts from 2018-12-11 and book/docs/tickets/51.rst)

After these lamentations I had another look at our public demo page and the documentation about Noi and Così, and I updated the following pages:

• https://www.lino-framework.org/demos.html

• https://using.lino-framework.org/apps/noi

• https://dev.lino-framework.org/apps.html#noi

• https://using.lino-framework.org/apps/cosi/

• https://dev.lino-framework.org/apps.html#cosi

No, it’s not finished (it will never be finished ;-) but it got again a bit better.