Call for Help to the International Odoo Open-Source Community

Dostupno i na bosanskom.

Introduction

Dear ERP professionals and enthusiasts who base your work on the Odoo open-source platform, we need your help. We have launched an initiative to create a Bosnian-Herzegovinian Odoo open-source community.

The Company “bring.out”

We are a company that has been operating exclusively in the local market for the past 30 years with our own accounting solutions. We have been working intensively on Bosnian localization of Odoo for the past three years. During this period, we have completed the following projects:

  • VAT calculation
  • Fiscalization for both Bosnian-Herzegovinian entities
  • Payroll calculation for the Bosnian-Herzegovinian entity “Federation of BiH”
  • Complete e-banking solution (payments, bank statements) for one bank operating in BiH

In addition, we have developed several modules that are not closely tied to Bosnian localization. For example, the last module we developed is “AI OCR” recognition of incoming cost invoices.

We are a micro-enterprise - a team of two engineers. We do not have our own sales department or any administration. Therefore, unsurprisingly, the reach of our work and influence is limited. As an engineering team, our main criteria in business have always been of a technical nature. This is how the choice of the Odoo open-source platform came about1.

Why “Open-Source Only”

We are also mostly an “open-source only” company regarding our offerings. The reason is again primarily technical: We do not want our tools to be locked in by a single vendor. We see Odoo as a tool for developing our solutions. Similar to databases and programming languages we use, we want key components of our systems to be free - open-source software.

Collaboration with Official Odoo Partners and Odoo EE Users

We deliver our software solutions wherever possible. Users choose their IT platform according to their own needs and preferences. If a user has “Odoo EE”, we will deliver our solutions on that platform2.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a small European country. We are located in southeastern Europe on the Balkan Peninsula. We are one of the poorest countries in Europe. In the process of the breakup of the former federal state, Bosnia and Herzegovina became independent and was admitted to the UN in April 1992. However, at the same time, a brutal and bloody war began. Like any other war, its main cause was the struggle for power and resources. Ethnic and religious differences were exploited in the most brutal way as “fuel” to achieve those goals. The essence of the plan was to divide Bosnia and Herzegovina between the “big” neighbors Serbia and Croatia. Unfortunately, one of the outcomes of the war is that the war crime of genocide was committed on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina3. The state has a complex organization and three economic areas:

  • Entity Republika Srpska
  • Entity Federation of BiH
  • Brcko District

The Odoo Open-Source Platform as a Possible Point of Connection

Bosnia and Herzegovina is my only country. I mention this because many of my fellow citizens hold citizenship of neighboring countries. Additionally, many of them tie their identity exclusively to those countries4. If those fellow citizens were to write the previous paragraph, its content would be completely different. Ethnic Serbs would certainly omit or even deny the part about genocide, Croats the part about dividing Bosnia and Herzegovina between Serbia and Croatia. This is our reality. It makes us a country that is often said to be where “nothing can be agreed upon”. I am an engineer. For a project to be successfully realized, an engineer must understand and respect the context. In the case of my country, political and social relations have a great impact on all projects and processes. I see the divided Bosnian-Herzegovinian society as one of the key negative factors for forming an Odoo community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But, to be completely honest, even when the field of action is narrowed down to parts of the state that consider themselves a homogeneous whole, distrust and misunderstanding of the concept of sharing and solidarity dominate. A society where divisions and misunderstanding dominate adopts those practices even where there is no valid reason for it. Distrust and misunderstanding spread like viruses.

I see the Odoo open-source platform as a possible “good” virus that would connect interested engineers and everyone else involved in ERP system implementation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Linux is equally used and developed by Chinese and Americans based on common interests. We can apply the same principles here.

Our Steps So Far

We started to concretize the idea of a Bosnian-Herzegovinian Odoo open-source community with the announcement of “hodi.ba”:

One of the projects we see as an excellent starting point is the “hodify” project - a project for migrating legacy ERP systems to Odoo5:

An Engineering Answer to the Question: “Bosanski Brod” or “Brod”?

As an engineer, in the process of defining a problem, I always look for representative examples6. A good example of Bosnian reality is the naming of cities7. One part of the citizens calls cities by their pre-war name, while the other by the new one. On this issue, no political agreement has ever been made, nor does anyone expect one to be reached. In the Bosnian localization we made, there is a database of cities. Expectedly, the names we defined contain the prefix “Bosanski” (Bosnian): “Bosanski Brod”. However, users in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian entity “Republika Srpska” would not accept such localization. What is a possible solution? One solution is that the user can define a parameter “Bosanski Brod or Brod”. Based on that parameter, the city database will be in accordance with the user’s preferences. Here I am talking about categories that are not constitutionally defined8. However, there are categories that are constitutionally defined. An example is the name of the language9. The Bosnian language is a constitutional category, as are Serbian and Croatian languages10.

To summarize: the idea is that nothing in the Bosnian localization can be found to be unconstitutional or illegal, while everything that is used ambiguously11 would be parameterized according to user preferences.

Your Experiences

What are the experiences in your countries? What were the main positive “triggers” in the development of your Odoo open-source communities? What were the main obstacles? Do you have any ideas and suggestions that would be applicable in my country?

hernad@bring.out.ba

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Footnotes

  1. One of the main factors for Odoo was the PostgreSQL database, which we have been using for over 10 years in our legacy software solution “F18”. ↩

  2. If the technical prerequisites exist. ↩

  3. Committed and judicially convicted - International Court of Justice in The Hague for war crimes. ↩

  4. Many do not even have citizenship of neighboring countries, but align with the political narrative that Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a state or is an imposed state. ↩

  5. If we look at the details of the “hodify” project, we notice that it is conceptually a project that the international Odoo community could also use. ↩

  6. Examples that are simple enough to understand but well represent the problem. ↩

  7. One of the pillars of separatist wartime policies was the denial of everything bearing the name “Bosanski” (Bosnian). These policies resulted in all cities that bore the name “Bosanski” in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian entity “Republika Srpska” having those prefixes removed. This state remained even after the war. ↩

  8. As far as I know, there is no firm constitutional basis for either side here. ↩

  9. In the Bosnian-Herzegovinian entity “Republika Srpska”, authorities impose that the “Bosnian” language be called the “Bosniak” language. ↩

  10. Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are three official languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ↩

  11. As a result of the lack of agreement. ↩