Ola LBR Community,
At the end of this 2 days conference among you all and a week’s visit to famous Brazil in Sao Paulo, i do feel a bit tired and exhausted but very very glad and happy to have personally met, discussed and known you all.
The people here are very cordial, friendly and my type of community - like to have fun and also brave to show their contributions. I can see that your community meeting is bigger than the top country - Germany’s country meeting, not that i want to compare but just to tell you what i have seen in my travels around the world. I believe in future Sao Paulo can hold a world conference for the ADempiere bazaar.
In such a short 2 days, I have tried to spread the spirit and vision of been an Open Source advocate, mixing passion and the professional capability needed to implement an Open Source ERP, unlike SAP or JD Edwards. You all come here knowing what this project is and what it is not. We do have strong points and we do have weak points.
This LBR project belongs to the public who are Brazilian because of its unique requirements and wonderful taxation system. I am not sure how you manage to survive all this while with such an inadequate ADempiere ERP not able to fulfil those requirements prior to the latest changes which i hear has made your ERP much better and less painful to use.
I hope you are grateful to all the contributors for what they have done and always remember that it is a community spirit of self-help and collaboration that will make this project alive or otherwise it will die, due to it been one-sided and not well taken care of. You have to ensure the top contributors remain not only alive and doing well, but more contributors come forth to nurture and make this community bigger.
Brazil in itself is too big a market to be handled by even 100 ERP consultant companies the size of Kenos. Brazil is a major trading partner with many big nations in the world such as China. There is a high demand for more B2B systems and the latest integration between systems. I am sure you all will make a lot of money, provided you know the ERP well, and with the right experience, and also great patience to let the market see that you are serious in serving them in the long term, and not for the short term for fast money and sloppy projects.
ERP is a complex product and the people needed must be highly educated and capable. Thus you have no choice but to work together on the biggest prjoects, as i expect large companies to know about LBR pretty soon. I hope you will see that sharing a bigger cake is better than having your own little biscuit.
In order for LBR to survive it must grow. A project cannot remain stagnant or else it will simply wane and die. There will be more challenges ahead when the project is bigger. I know this because i started as a small farm online tutorial writer in 2004 with my simple red1.org, and as you all know, i foster a small community that finally attracted the creation of the ADempiere fork.
Today we seem too big as there are so many countries organising conferences and i am getting more invitations to visit more countries. Everywhere i go i see great potential among the communities. I also find strange situations, experiences and challenges that are unique to each one. Thus i am not an expert on any particular country or situation. I can only share what i learnt and know hoping it can help give you insight on a global scale and better see some way ahead among those challenges.
I seem to write a long message here but it is because i am still happy after meeting you all even though tired and hoping to return to my home country soon end of this month.
I hope you all keep in touch always online or via this forum if you wish, and i pray you all the best and success in all you do. May we meet again physically in future in a bigger conference and with more amazing contributions to show us.
Lastly i must thank KENOS, the team there, particularly Hilario Fochi and Ricardo Santana for making my short stay here so sweet and memorable. I hope to repay them one day whenever them come over to the other side of the world to my country, i hope to be a better host to them than they have been to me.
red1
