jGnucashlib

[Christian Stimming]

Hi there,

Am Sonntag, 16. Oktober 2005 16:56 schrieb Neil Williams:
> On Sunday 16 October 2005 2:12 pm, Herbert Thoma wrote:
> > Anyone aware of this?
> >
> > http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgnucashlib/
>
> It's not free software, despite the GPL indicator at SF.

well, the author (Marcus Wolschon) has added a link to that project to the 
German wiki pages, so I learnt about that a few weeks ago. No, Neil's not 
quite right -- this *is* free software, at least some part of it. 

I've had some email exchange with the author and discussed with him this kind 
of project presentation. It turns out that he wrote a full re-implementation 
of an XML reader and writer, all in Java. The "only" connection to gnucash is 
that he is using the identical XML file format -- for the simply reason, he 
told me, because the gnucash file format is "so much superior to anything 
he's seen so far as a financial file format" :-)

He really wrote that XML parser and gnucash-identical object model from 
scratch. He never re-used any other existing code, neither from gnucash nor 
from somewhere else, so he's not bound to GPL or anything else. He can 
therefore freely choose the license of his resulting product. And this is 
precisely what he does: He publishes parts of his code freely (I'm totally 
sure about the licensing conditions), and that part happens to be the 
XML-reading part including the object model. That part happens not to contain 
the XML-writing part, so that's what he means by "read-only" code. I *think* 
he publishes that part under a "suffiently open" license, because otherwise 
he would run into problems with sourceforge's licensing conditions. 
Nevertheless there are no legal reasons that prevent him from owning more 
source code than he publishes under that open license.

> I've written to the developer outlining my right of access to the source
> code.

There is no right. You can surely write to him. Maybe he decides to give that 
other part to you anyway. Whatever. If you need Java code, then this might 
help you, but otherwise I simply wouldn't care.

And yes, I've already pointed out to him that an XML-reader and -writer is 
also the goal of cashutil and the other of Neil's work, but he for whatever 
reason decided that he's better off writing this stuff for himself. 

I simply don't care about this. Take it as a compliment that our file format 
was well-chosen.

Christian