Dear fellow Trytonies,
on Monday, Feb 5th 2024, I declared to resign from my position as a member of board of directors at Tryton foundation as well, following my friend Sergi.
After more than a year, I have to say that this board of directors does not have any relevance. There was not one single meeting, no discussion, hardly any correspondence. I made a few proposals, issued some polls, but most of them were not even discussed. Decisions made have been limited to few formal or legal topics.
I applied for the position in order to be a representative of the user perspective, which seemed and seems to be urgent in the Tryton project. Now I need to confess that I could not achieve anything of what appears important to me - not even starting any debate.
In fact, I found it offensive that all my attempts to support the Tryton project with contributions to user guidance were always more or less brusquely rejected by CĂ©dric Krier - many esteemed colleagues know what I am talking about. His insistence on a single form of contribution accepted by him makes it practically impossible for others to support the project - and in my opinion he is doing great harm to the project. NB: In the meantime, we have started to collect information on Tryton community - HOWTOS for users like me who cannot read code. Unfortunately, CĂ©dric Krier is sabotaging even this work by refusing to link to these pages. Thus they are not really publicised, contributions to improve quality there are can only happen by accident.
Still, I do very much respect Cédric Krier’s commitment, his deep understanding and the basic concepts of Tryton he created. Last months I learned more about Tryton’s immense flexibility, which is impressing, amongst many other qualities.
At the same time I need to say that Tryton still is a very small project with a user base way too small in relation to its potential. This IMHO is a strong indicator that the project did and does some things terribly wrong. All of that IMHO boils down to one basic problem: Tryton is not really a community, but more of an allegiance (Gefolgschaft, vasallaje). Basic mechanism seems to be that people either agree with CĂ©dric Krier in any detail - or will soon leave the project.
So I questioned myself on what can be a vision for the future, assumed actors will not change their basic dispositions? - Best chance I can see is a Debain/Ubuntu model: Having a puristic core for nerds only (equivalent to Tryton today) and a “Trytobuntu” or “Trytonice” or some other fancy wording. The latter must enrich the solid core concept with user-friendlyness, rich various user guidance, easy onboarding etc, using patch sets and additional modules, wrapped into a handy installer and pre-configured databases. The fundaments of this already have been laid with the work on https://tryton.community.
Of course, segregation mostly is a big threatening to any project, especially if it’s so small as Tryton is. But I don’t believe, that the big potential to growth a handy FOSS ERP would have, can be realised in the actual structure. And hopefully, with overcoming the great mistakes made in the past, the future REAL community can grow and compensate the segregation caused initial loss.
Thank for the trust to elect me as a director - and see you at tryton.community.