Newbie migration issues

[TC]

 >>This open source
>>stuff is just way too buggy and hard to deal with. One can only afford 
>>to burn up so much of one's time for the sake of feeling politically good.

> Hey, you get what you pay for!  Seriously, nobody is paid to work on
> gnucash.  It's a completely voluntary effort, and all the developers
> have other work to do for real, paying jobs.

Couple or three things.

First (and I know Derek didn't really mean to imply otherwise) you 
actually get more than you pay for (easy when you pay nothing :-). In 
fact, in some software, you get more than you would if you *did* pay for 
it (but suffered the resulting loss of open-sourceness).

Second, this reaction from OSS users is not uncommon, and amounts to a 
deep-seated feeling of "I'd rather you gave me nothing, than gave me 
something that wasn't perfect".  But I don't think users *really* 
believe that.  It's just hard to remember when you're struggling with 
the effects of some bug or other.  But it would probably be worth having 
some central OSS statement explaining this that stressed-out developers 
could point stressed-out users to. And complaining users: if you really 
do think it would be better to have no Gnucash than a 
Gnucash-with-its-current-limits, then you have that option right now. 
No one forces you to use it.

Finally - and I say this with the greatest respect for the developers 
concerned - *sometimes*, *some* developers on this list don't make their 
own life any easier by being so grumpy. :-)

tc

P.S. And I am not currently a Gnucash user.  I was, but I'm currently 
experimenting with John Wiegley's command-line-drive 'ledger'.  If what 
you want is ease of use and a nice well-developed (yes, 
*well*-developed) GUI, then try ledger for a few days.  That'll either 
cure you of GUI-love, or you'll realise what a good thing you've got 
going in Gnucash.