[us-marketing] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] LibreOffice and OpenERP

On 01/01/2013 12:14 PM, Tom Davies wrote:

Hi Tom,

>

> If they put those resources into using Base as their front-end then a LOT of the support and 
> development work would be done by people they didn't even have to pay.  Of course some of the work 
> they did pay for would be used by people that weren't using their product but those people would 
> become more aware of their product as a result.

Sorry, but I have to disagree. There is a good reason for developing 
your own reporting module for an ERP, and that is independence. IMO, 
this is probably a fairly reasonable business decision, especially in 
light of Base's current quirks, and its current dependence on a Java 
implementation that is not to everyone's liking. The reporting side of 
things in LO depends on either the Pentaho engine (which is a competitor 
of OpenERP for BI lest we forget) or the UNO API (which is currently in 
a state of flux with previously available interfaces being 
removed/unpublished/deprecated, and others being added). No one in any 
sane state of business mind would want to delegate resources to a moving 
target like that, especially where it is probably easier to use and 
manipulate ODF documents instead.

Having used TinyERP before OpenERP came into existence, the Base 
extension that one could get hold of to interface with the backend 
postgres database required a fair deal of understanding of what went on 
under the hood of TinyERP to be able to do anything useful with it. Even 
using the ERP workflow engine via Writer documents which were then 
converted was a rather untrivial affair. I'm all for having a competent 
Report Designer tool within LO, but we already have basic C++ code for 
that, which was mainly abandoned during Base2 development to implement a 
subset of the Java-based Pentaho BI solution instead (the latter being 
far more complete IMO, but a separate tool nonetheless). The result of 
that we can see today as a difficult to maintain, difficult to debug, 
unstable, continually breaking tool that neither meets user requirements 
nor satisfaction, even as the other modules in LO progress.

Just my 2c.


Alex


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