Are There Plans For A GUI Overhaul?
Lincoln A Baxter
lab at lincolnbaxter.com
Thu Oct 20 00:31:29 EDT 2016
IMO, you are asking the right (hard) questions... I'm interested in
seeing the response to the https://kmymoney.org/ question. Is this a
fork, or not?
Lincoln
On Tue, 2016-10-18 at 09:56 +0100, John Ralls wrote:
> > On Oct 18, 2016, at 8:13 AM, Paul Phillips <paul at patchpitch.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hi John,
> >
> > Indeed it is a shame, and I regret causing the discord and
> suspicion. Please accept my apologies.
> >
> > Thanks for your insight and the link to the SFC. I shall get in
> touch with them.
> >
> > The only other way of engaging with the GnuCash project without the
> need of either a contract or management oversight is to create a
> fork. It would therefore obviously be completely optional whether
> the dev team adopted any of the changes. But if the fork development
> matched the Gnucash roadmap and project guidelines, the chances of
> merger would presumably increase.
> >
> > However the key to enabling this to succeed is the user base, and
> as a fork, the user base starts from scratch.
> >
>
> Paul,
>
> There are forks and then there are Github forks. The latter is one
> usual way for "outside" developers and documentors to contribute,
> submitting their work through a Github pull request (which is a bit
> different and much easier to use than the traditional git email pull
> request used by the Linux project.
>
> The other kind of fork is what happened with Open Office a few years
> ago: Unhappy with the way Oracle was managing the product, a large
> chunk of the development team took the code base and created a new
> product, Libre Office. I think that's what would have to happen with
> a "commercialized" GnuCash: The "commercial" team would have to
> create a new product to work on to guarantee that the paid-for work
> actually gets released in a product.
>
> I've put "commercial" in scare-quotes because the new product would
> still be limited by the provisions of the GPL and the GnuCash project
> would be able to merge any changes that they liked into the Free
> version. Both because of that and the limitations of the GPL the
> "commercial" entity would have to find some other way of monetizing
> the product; that's normally done on open source projects by selling
> support. IMO that's a hard nut to crack: Developers, documentors, and
> managers are expensive and the "commercial" entity would need a
> pretty hefty cash-flow; a reasonable-sized team might run as much as
> $1M/year once overhead is included.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
>
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