GnuCash Features Survey

Paul Lussier pll@mclinux.com
Mon, 02 Jul 2001 16:19:17 -0400


In a message dated: Mon, 02 Jul 2001 15:53:59 EDT
Dwight Frye said:

>Linas Vepstas writes :
>> > Anyway, great survey, and please post the result in pretty 
>> > Guppi-generated graphs for everyone to see :)
>> 
>> one disapointment so far is that 50% or respondents are programmers, and
>> another 25% are engineers.  Where  are the 'ordinary users'?
>
>My guess is that at this point "ordinary users" can't get it
>installed and working.

I would have to agree with that.

>I'm an engineer with multiple years of
>Linux experience and I'll work my way through the dependencies
>eventually .... but have not had time to finish the exercise
>quite yet. An "ordinary user" would be hopelessly lost.

And this too.  I actually had to re-install my laptop with Debian 
before I could get GC installed and working on it, but that's only 
because trying to upgrade a lot of the stuff from RH6.0 was an 
excercise in mental anguish and physical torture :)

>This is *not* a slam on GnuCash or the development team, but is
>a statement of the situation as I see it. Another poster on the
>list pointed out that since GnuCash is not yet part of the main
>stream distributions, it is still an "early adopter" sort of
>situation. I agree, and guess that is why your responses are
>skewed in the direction of techie-types.

Also, just looking at who's on this mailing list is a good indication 
of who's using GnuCash.  Short of the actual development team and 
other individual contributors, it seems there are very few of us who 
are "Just Users"tm here.  I've been on this list for years it seems
(I believe since very near the begining), and noticed for the most
part that there seem to be very few non-developers on the list
(I'm not the only non-programmer here, am I? :)

And since the release of 1.6.0 alone, the amount of traffic on
this list has increased dramatically, which should be an indication
that GnuCash is at least receiving some kind of publicity (unless they're 
all lurkers who de-lurked for help).

But all in all, I think that until GnuCash gets rolled into RH and/or
Ximian Gnome I don't think we'll see a lot of "Just Users"tm trying 
it out.

Although, maybe you'd have more luck were Gnumatic to box it up and 
sit on store shelves next to RH Linux?  
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
----
	If we spent half as much time coding as we do bashing
	 others for not supporting Free/Open Source Software,
	      just imagine how much cooler we would be!

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!