announcing Bo-Keep 1.0.1

[Mark Jenkins]

Hello GnuCash developers and users,

On behalf of the members of ParIT Worker Co-op, I'm pleased to announce
the launch of Bo-Keep as a public/community free software project.
Bo-Keep is a desktop application that makes use of the python bindings
feature found in GnuCash 2.4.0 and 2.4.2.

http://bokeep.org/

Bo-Keep has always been free software (in development for years) -- what
we are doing today is proclaiming that version 1.0.1 sufficiently
demonstrates our vision, is good enough for us to actively solicit
contributions, closing our cathedral, and opening our bazaar.

To quote our website
"""Bo-Keep helps you keep your books so you don't get lost

Bo-Keep allows you to create custom data entry interfaces for accounting
software, speeding up data entry and reducing errors.

The system uses front-end plugins for data entry interfaces, and
back-end plugins to connect with various accounting programs.
"""

Our only useful back-end plugin right now is for GnuCash.

We'd like to be very clear on this next point -- we at ParIT and the
Bo-Keep project are *not* attempting a re-write of the GnuCash
user-interface in python. GnuCash provides an incredible amount of
powerful general purpose accounting and bookkeeping features. We could
not dream of being able to replicate them easily.
(and wish plenty of good luck to those with experimental projects that
are trying)

GnuCash excels and delivers on generality -- what Bo-Keep seeks to
provide is a platform where user-interfaces can be easily constructed
for specific, narrow data entry needs. Because of the training threshold
required for double-entry book-keeping, we hope this will allow
organizations to offload common bookkeeping tasks into the mode of pure
data-entry in order to achieve better entry speeds, reduce training time
and reduce errors.

Thus, we see BoKeep as a companion application/platform for GnuCash
(and eventually other accounting programs), its power and generality
will not be obsoleted.


To take BoKeep out of cathedral mode and into bazaar mode, we have
applied to have all aspects of the project (website, mailing list,
revision control, bug tracking) hosted on Savannah:
http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?10927

Until that goes through, we're welcoming participation on the temporary
mailing list :
http://parit.ca/mailman/listinfo/bokeep-devel
and our own subversion repository remains open to read-access.
http://svn.parit.ca/bo-keep/trunk/


Someone might be thinking, "why launch this as a separate project, why
not submit for inclusion in GnuCash?".

Our intention with Bo-Keep is to not be tied to GnuCash specifically. We
think it will flourish best as a separate project with separate goals
and a separate identity. As it stands right now, Bo-Keep can run and do
useful things without the GnuCash backend plugin.

It would make sense to copy some small pieces of Bo-Keep and the Bo-Keep
test suite into GnuCash, as we have some pretty decent tests for the
GnuCash back-end plugin which uses the GnuCash python bindings behind
the scenes. If someone prepared a patch for this, ParIT would consider a
request to license those specific files under GPL v2 or at your option
any later version so they could be included in GnuCash. (see post-script
on our use of GPL V3 for Bo-Keep)


Happy Hacking,
Mark Jenkins
Member
ParIT Worker Co-op

p.s.

BoKeep is licensed under GNU General Public License version 3, or at
your option any later version.

We respect the license of GnuCash
http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/browser/gnucash/tags/2.4.2/LICENSE

and understand that we probably have to come up with a patch to upgrade
all the "V2 or at your option any later" and "V2 or at your option V3"
files in GnuCash to say "V3 or at your option any later" and "((V2)/V3
only" so we and others can distribute GnuCash and Bo-Keep together.
(Folks can privately use the two together right now without concern)

If a v3 upgrade patch isn't desired in GnuCash (you still want to give
people the option to use new versions under V2), it still might make
sense to commit it to a branch here. I'd be willing to keep such a
branch in sync with the joys of svn merge.

If you're wondering why we'd go to this effort to do everything with GPL
V3 when we could just license Bo-Keep as v2 or at your option any later,
read this:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html