Plans for MBS/IP? (Austrian protocol)

[Martin Preuss]

Hi,

On Freitag, 18. Juli 2008, office at sico.at wrote:
[...]
> So my question is: Are there any plans/possibilities, to see this protocol
> in gnucash any time?
[...]

As far as AqBanking is concerned: Most likely not.

It's not that I don't want to, the reason is the STUZZA (which is the 
organisation to be contacted if you want to get to the specifications).

A few years ago - while I was implementing YellowNet, a Swiss protocol - I 
kindly asked the STUZZA about the specs. Unfortunately their answer was quite 
rude.

They told me, that they want to protect their protocol by not allowing free 
implementations because they believe that only a proprietary project is able 
to keep up with the changes in the specs. Open Source clients which would not 
be able to accomplish this - yeah, right - would hurt the protocol.

That is a bit surprising if you look at their homepage and their desciption of 
themselves... However, since they provide their own client I belive the real 
reasons lie elsewhere...

Anyway, at that particular moment I was happy to live in a country whose 
national homebanking protocols - HBCI, EBICS - are provided to everybody for 
free, as opposed to "security by obscurity".

Their argumentation and the rudeness of the answers from my contact led me to 
drop the whole matter for good. A few years later someone asked me about this 
again and he told me that he had some usable contacts there but he was never 
heard of again.

So in short: I don't think that we will ever see a free implementation of the 
protocol in question, and I never want to contact the STUZZA again.


Regards
Martin

-- 
"Things are only impossible until they're not"

Martin Preuss - http://www.aquamaniac.de/
AqBanking - http://www.aqbanking.de/
LibChipcard - http://www.libchipcard.de/