Cygwin / MinGW Port

[Stuart D. Gathman]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Leander Perera wrote:

> Just curious. I was wondering if there has been an effort to port GnuCash to 
> the Cygwin or MinGW environments.

A few years ago, I would have said, "Just run Quicken" for those with
Windows.  However, Quicken 2003 (my last Quicken version - forced upgrade) has
become such a bloated pig that it takes forever to do anything - and I
have been on Gnucash since the beginning of the year.  So Gnucash would
actually be a useful light weight alternative to the standard Windows
offerings (what Quicken was once upon a time).

OT -

Keep in mind that while free beer is nice - I, and I expect others, would
be quite willing to pay a few bucks for a version of gnucash nicely
packaged for my system (RPM,Deb pkg,Windows setup), and pay again later
for an upgrade.  Gnucash has quite a few compile dependencies that makes
it tricky to build from source. 

I guess the catch is that the entity selling said binaries will stop
giving out the free beer, which might hinder the penetration of Gnucash.
Perhaps selling Windows binaries as a non-profit (proceeds fund
development), but continuing to provide free Linux packages would provide the
right incentives.  That model has seemed to work with things like
Tridia VNC (free Linux packages, $$$ Windows pro package).

I think more in the open source world need to realize that packaging
is a valuable service for non-geeks and for those not familiar with
the build environment.  It is not easy to create a trouble free
invisible package for a product - especially when there are interactions
with things like MySQL.  I know from experience building RPMs for
my own and others projects.  Selling packaging does not in any
detract from the freedom of having full source available.  (Although
I've noticed that it is harder to find the sources for RedHat Enterprise
since they've started selling the packaging as well as the service.)

-- 
	      Stuart D. Gathman <stuart at bmsi.com>
    Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
"Confutatis maledictis, flamis acribus addictis" - background song for
a Microsoft sponsored "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial.