Trust isn't declared. It's shown.
Why Odoo's story deserves to be told as an epic, open source included.
Hi all đ
As everyone comes back a bit groggy from Roland Garros, Super Return or Viva Tech, we can already see the summer holidays announcements on the horizon, which will slow down all business decisions. And thatâs good. It does us all good, ahahâŠ
Three weeks ago, I went for a trip in Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, where I visited Odooâs headquarters. This Belgian scale-up, which many still discover, baffled, years after its success broke out, is a hive you can hardly imagine until youâve set foot in it. A few figures that make your head spin: 16 million users worldwide, a valuation that now reaches 8,6 billion EUR, revenue almost 1 billion EUR and already more than 7â500 employees, on track to 10â000 by year end.
The entrepreneur who built all of this: Fabien Pinckaers, I went to meet him, in Belgium. I was very kindly welcomed the whole day. I was touched by the teamsâ kindness and their professionalism. Anyway. A 45â conversation about this almost-decacorn from Belgium. Worthy of an epic.
And a subject that struck me on the way back: the place of open source in building software. We often reduce it to a question of price or licence.
But what if it was first a question of trust?
The concept we think we know
Open source is often reduced to âfree and modifiableâ. Thatâs hugely reductive. This movement was born in the 1980s with Richard Stallmanâs GNU project, then took on another dimension in 1991 when a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, published the kernel of a system he called Linux. This was not a commercial gesture. It was simply a developer sharing his code so others could improve it.
What followed is the story of a mode of collaboration that ended up dominating global tech. Linuxâs market share is estimated at 90% on Amazonâs cloud. Banks, insurers, states running their systems on code that no one truly owns. A report on 273 UK companies shows that 97% use open source software and 93% of financial, banking and insurance players rely on open source operating systems (here).
What works in this model is speed. Thousands of developers testing, fixing the same code, in parallel, without waiting for an editorâs next release. Trust comes from the transparency of the code itself.
What doesnât work is the money. Nearly 86% of open source developers are unpaid, while their contributions account for an average of 55% of corporate software infrastructure. The shift from a free model to monetisation almost always clashes with the community that grew it.
This is exactly the wall Fabien ran into with Odoo. And thatâs where the story gets interesting, because his answer wasnât to renounce open source, it was to turn it into something else.
The channel before the narrative
For Odoo, open source was never a choice between idealism and strategy. The two were built together, from the start.
Before he even had a sales team, Fabien had clients and prospects all over the world, through the strength of communities. A genuine hive, with developers contributing to the code, accountants testing the modules or integrators reselling services around the software. So when it came time to open an office in the US or in India, the work wasnât to start from zero, but to activate a network that already existed, for free, for years.
This community became the blind spot no proprietary competitor could replicate quickly. SAP, Microsoft or Oracle sell complex suites through salespeople and long sales cycles. Odoo, on its side, grew from the bottom up, without having to convince anyone of the productâs merit before letting them try it.
But in 2014, this model hit the same wall as the entire open source ecosystem. The company couldnât survive on donations and paid support alone. The solution was Open Core: 80% of applications remain open source, 20% become paid. The community felt betrayed, even though the business choice had been the right one from the start.
Fabien says it himself: he had sold an almost moral promise, âopen source is good, proprietary is badâ, without preparing his community for the idea that one day the productâs sustainability would require monetising it. Itâs that promise, not the monetisation strategy, that cost him a year or two of online bashing, in his own words.
Today, firms like KPMG have replaced 100% of their management tools in Belgium with Odoo. The ecosystem counts 250â000 full-time people around the company. Just enormous. Philosophy and acquisition channel were never two separate things. It was one single engine, with the wrong narrative at the start. Thatâs it.
Little teaser :)
In this conversation, we also go back to the moment Odoo found itself with two weeks of cash left, what he learned managing a board in the middle of a crisis and a governance rule he discovered far too late. We also talk about how AI has already changed certain jobs at Odoo, without eliminating a single one.
Listen to the full episode with Fabien Pinckaers here.
Iâm not naive: this piece is unashamedly admiring. I own it 100%. Because what Odoo has built deserves to be told as an epic and sometimes, you need to make room for admiration so it can be passed onâŠ
Transparency⊠againâŠ
When the company had to lay off 30% of its staff overnight to survive, Fabien showed everyone the numbers, the curves going down, how many weeks of cash were left. Three years later, none of the remaining employees had left.
The same logic explains why Odoo today publishes average salaries by department before a candidate even applies or why the company kept communicating its figures online when it was on the brink of bankruptcy.
Of course, Odoo is not a bank. A regulated institutionâs leader doesnât have that freedom: banking secrecy, the confidentiality of an ongoing matter. Full transparency there isnât a matter of courage, it can simply be forbidden.
But the question Fabien raises still holds within that legal frame: what are you allowed to show, that you choose to hide anyway?
That might be the real governance lesson of this episode. A lesson that comes from a founder alone, at midnight, writing a layoff list by hand, who still chooses to show everything the next day.
And what if you applied this to your board, to your executive committee, within the limits of what the law allows you to show : how many of your people have already seen the real numbers, in a real moment of stress, before you were forced to?