I fully share Yenthe analysis (easier to read on the original post).

Nevertheless, from last days experience, Odoo commitment "V8.0 will be kept in V9.0 community" will not be respected and some V8.0 official modules will either drastically change, or disappear. Many basics of Odoo are unchanged since OpenERP V5 and need complete re-engineering. Examples are accounting, sale and purchase whose new versions will be part of V9.0 and create uncompatibility with the behaviour of several V8.0 modules.

Hi Zahin,

To summarize an answer on your question: Odoo V5, V6, V7, V8 where completely open source. V9 will be mostly open source and partially closed source due to the new enterprise contract introduced in V9.
I've made a topic about the licensing which you can find here. To quote my own answer:

In version 9 we will see a rather big change in terms of licensing.Odoo V8 was licensed under AGPLv3 and this will now change to LGPLv3 in combination with OE. 

So, what will this change involve? Odoo 9 changes to LGPLv3 and becomes the Odoo community edition. The LGPLv3 licensing will allow anybody to sell Odoo apps on the app store. Besides of the Odoo 9 community edition there will be a V9 Enterprise Edition. This is a pretty big game changer in Odoo 9 and directly stears Odoo from being fully open sourced to being partially open sourced and partially closed. The Enterprise Edition will contain a set of new apps on top of the Odoo community edition.


A good thing to know is that the Enterprise Edition will never be open-sourced and the code will only be available to official Odoo partners and Odoo itselfs. This also means that a non-official partner cannot sell the Enterprise Edition and thus an Odoo customer can only buy the Enterprise Version from Odoo or its partners. Another interesting fact is that the Enterprise Edition will contain full responsiveness! It will fully adapt itself to mobile, tablet, computer,.. and means that this will be the first Odoo version that is truely mobile useable. 

If you would like to have access to these features you will need to buy the Enterprise version, which will be an additional 20€ per user per month. 

The modules that we now know in Odoo 8 will remain available for anyone in V9, without any extra cost, and will always be publicly on Github. New apps that will be in the Enterprise contract are account_dashboard, account_check_print, web_mobile, project_forecast and probably a whole lot more that are not publicly discussed yet.


While this post covers the basic information and details it still misses a lot of information. There is still limited information available at the moment and this will keep expanding when we get towards the release of Odoo 9 (Q4 2015). You can view the official presentation about licensing from Olivier Dony here: https://www.odoo.com/slides/slide/open-source-licenses-196

Yenthe