GnuCash

[BenoitGrégoire]

On Monday 11 August 2003 16:42, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> Hi - I saw your "State of the GnuCash project, a call for help"
> article, and I have 3 thanks:
>
> * Thanks for writing that article, that helped me understand
>   where your project is!
> * Thanks for mentioning my SLOC counting work in it!
> * Thanks for responding to my response at LWN.

LOL, the OSS world definitely is small!  Your welcome.

> I really think that the problem with GnuCash is that it doesn't
> have quite enough functionality to be useful to any particular group.
> It does so much... but not enough for any particular individual
> to use it.
>
> If it had budgeting and QIF export, I'd use GnuCash myself
> as a home user.
>
> SNIP...
>
> Anyway, my two cents.  I guess my thinking is that you're almost
> there, don't quit now, just focus on those two capabilities and
> you'll hit a home run.

Well, QIF export is definitely coming pretty soon (in what stable release will 
it be released is another question).

Now as for Budgeting it's definitely very high on the requested feature list.  
However I don't agree that it's sufficient to score a home run.  

Basically you are suggesting what we've been doing these past two or three 
years:  Try to keep up with everyone's "Must have" feature.  The point of the 
article was that we can't just keep working the way we were:  Running as fast 
as we can to meet the elusive "sufficient for everyone" feature list and then 
catch our breath.  The world is changing around us, and by the time we 
implement one feature, user expectations have risen.  The current popular 
list of unimplemented "Some users claim it's the only missing feature 
stopping him from using gnucash" is:  DirectConnect, Budgeting, Capital gain 
calculation.  But it changes weekly.

I think it IS possible to attract enough developers to win this race, but we 
must organize differently.
-- 
Benoit Grégoire
http://step.polymtl.ca/~bock/