www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash

[Linas Vepstas]

This caught my eye:


> >> Besides, it's rather
> >> hard to argue that gnucash belongs there in any form, since we're not
> >> part of Gnome.
>
> Linas could explain the historical relations.
>

GnuCash is one of the founding members of the Gnome Foundation.   I helped
draft the Articles of Incorporation (or rather, provided one draft, which
was completely rewritten...) and then, much later, stood on a podium with a
dozen other founders at the press conference announcing it.  The room was
jammed with reporters, not even standing room, with some of the more
important people not even able to get into the room, and one of those big
giant studio-TV cameras aimed at us.  The Gnome Foundation announcement got
covered by the New York Times, and a bunch of other national papers. We had
top-notch PR at the time.

So, yes, in this sense, GnuCash is very much a part of Gnome.

Distribution-wise, it was never in practice a part of the Gnome desktop
distribution, for practical and technical reasons.  The Gnome Desktop
consisted of the window manager, the panel, a bunch of applets,
admin/preferences guis, and an assortment of basic apps (gif viewer, games,
etc.)  By contrast, GnuCash was already a large, complicated app by then.
None of the Gnome guys knew anything about accounting or finance, and
weren't in the slightest bit interested in such topics.  In addition,
GnuCash already had its own website, source repository, mailing list and
ftp site long before Gnome even existed  (The original GnuCash had a
LessTif/Motif interface) so we didn't need to get these from Gnome, and
were never dependent on them. (I think we had a Gnome wiki for a while).
 Thus, Gnome never packaged GnuCash, much in the same way that it didn't
package a word-processor or web browser.  These were distro-provided
add-ins.

Finally, I think our checkbook-register-style interface made the Gnome
human-interface design guys apoplectic.  They preferred much much more
basic interfaces: large simple buttons, single text-entry fields on  big
canvas, no user preferences menus, and all other menus simplified as much
as possible.  GnuCash broke all of these rules (and yes, sadly, there were
partly right: GnuCash was a little bit too complicated, with too many
menus, too many choices.)  The inability of GnuCash to move with the pack
when human-interface guidelines changed really meant that it evolved on its
own, and did not follow the beaten path.  Ergo, today, GnuCash is de facto
not a part of Gnome.

-- Linas