Will GnuCash ever work for me?

[Linas Vepstas]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 12:47:45PM -0500, Derek Neighbors was heard to remark:
> Bill,
> 
> I dropped the user list as no need to publicly say this. :)
> 
> > This isn't possible with Gnucash.  We depend on several Gnome libraries,
> > namely gtkhtml and (indirectly, through gtkhtml) libgal, which are not
> > part of the "standard Gnome platform" and won't be at least until the
> > release of Gnome-2.0.  Indeed, libgal will probably never be part of the
> > standard Gnome platform, according to Havoc, Maciej, and several other
> > Gnome people who jumped down my throat when I suggested it should be. 
> 
> FWIW: This is the problem with GNOME and most of GNU/Linux in general.
> They have NO CONCEPT of release managment or standards.  This is why no
> one is adopting GNU/Linux on the desktop in corporate america.  We can
> laugh at M$ all we want, but they do this fairly well.  

Nah, that's bullshit.  You weren't there when they were coding win95.
If you care to remember, win95 was supposed to ship to customers in
1992/93.  I was flying to redmond once or twice a year, and they would
have these big propaganda posters on the wall, telling everyone to work
harder.  They had these 6 foot high by 20 foot long charts of number of
new bugs opened per month, and how many megs it took to boot. (They were
trying to fit in 16megs, but never ever got close.)   They shipped
three fucking years late.  They would have shipped in 1996, except that
Bill in his infinite wisdom changed the name to 'win95', and so the
developers were shamed into getting it done in 1995.  Gates to
employees: 'news flash: ship in 1995 or get fired'.  Even then, it took
them till september or something like that.  And win95 basicaly 
sucked until they got two service packs out a year later, and things 
got 'stable'.  

What, do I need to remind you about BSOD?  Or the incompatible
programming interfaces between all the different service packs, which
aren't documented? The 3rd party sofware developers paid dearly for
this.  And look at the device-driver fiasco in win98.  Compaq took 
a $25M write-off because they got shafted with the good-ol unstable, 
its-different-every-week device-driver interface.  They missed shipping
on time for the christmas PC season, and had to re-issue last-years
models!  It was the begining of the end for compaq.   And you know what 
Gates told them?  He said 'hey, whatever, Dell & Gateway aren't 
complaining...'.   That's cause Dell & Gateway were too scared stiff 
to complain.

Maybe we've forgotten how Microsoft shafted Intel on 'compatibility'
with the Pentium Pro?  Intel lost gobs of money, I dunno, a few hundred
million? on that little broken promise.  Don't *ever* say Microsoft
does a good job on compatibility.

And the unix world doesn't exactly have a track record either:
you weren't programming in the 80's, when C++ was different every
year,  and your old programs wouldn't even compile.  Forget C++.  
Just plain C programs would stop compiling because when ANSI
wasn't busy undoing K&R, then the unix venodrs kept moving inlcude 
files around.   Look at freaking struct tm, times, timestruct, and 
all the timeofday crap. 20 years later, its still a mess. 

When Gnome celebrates its 5th birthday, we can resume this conversation.
If its still not stable by then, I'll eat my hat. 

> It is no small task and has little to do with programming.  Its mostly
> marketing, scheduling and project management

Ding ding ding.   Microsoft marketing is so hot that almost everyone
forgot that win95 was supposed to ship in 1993.   

> Both of these packages are
> complete clusterfscks wrt to release schedules.  

The open source/free software world has never seen the likes of the
kinds of disasters that beset the proprietary world.  All of our
petty arguments look like a happy tea party compared to what's going on
in the proprietary world.  


--linas

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pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas@linas.org>
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