gnucash roadahead

[Andrew Sackville-West]

Brian Rose wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have used Gnucash exclusively for several years and it is ok for me. 
> However, recently
> Quickbooks Pro came as a bundle as part of a Mac desktop I purchased and 
> it looks very nice.

FWIW, I used QB for years and loved it. It was easy to use and included 
all sorts of things like payroll (including tax payments etc.) Problems 
I encountered that pushed me to make the migration to gnucash -- 1. 
Forced upgrades which required $. Upgrades were forced by discontinuing 
payroll support for older versions -- If I didn't pay, then I couldn't 
use the payroll service that I was already paying for. The payroll 
service was basically automated downloads of tax table information at a 
cost of $250(?) a year or so. Fine, that made life easy. When they tried 
to force me to upgrade my PERFECTLY USABLE copy of QB for the second or 
third time in 5 years, I declined and canceled the tax service figuring 
I'd enter my own tax tables. Its actually fairly easy to do BUT THE MATH 
WAS WRONG. IOW, I would enter proper tax information and it would 
calculate the taxes INCORRECTLY. I confirmed this over several pay 
periods by manually calculating payroll as well. This is what started me 
looking at migrating. 2. Locked-up information. MY information is 
FOREVER locked up in quickbooks. There is no transaction export anymore. 
the information files are encrypted. They have a total lock on it and 
now I have to forever keep a windows partition that I ONLY use when I 
need past years information from QB. I discovered this during the 
migration and it convinced me that I had made the right choice. 3. 
Double-entry. QB doesn't really support double-entry accounting. Its 
sort of a combinatin of double-entry and the basic check register like 
you'd see in quicken. This I learned after the migration as I got more 
comfortable with GNC. 4. Accountant. my accountant was frustrated at 
having to purchase new versions of QB every year to do corporate taxes 
for his customers (see 1 above).

Sorry, I didn't mean to get into a total anti-QB rant, but I left it 
about a year ago and have never been happier. And I wanted you to 
understand the realities of QB. I have control of my information. 
Granted I do more work now (payroll mostly), but this is a fair trade 
in my estimation. I've taken some of the money saved in upgrade and tax 
table costs and donated it to GNC. QB/Quicken became a mature and decent 
product many years ago and the company has had to change its model to 
continue making money. They do this by providing annual updates with 
lots of cruft, and then forcing those upgrades down your throat if you 
use any of the other services they tack on. Not a good plan. and they 
lock you in by preventing you from exporting your information into other 
formats. </rant>

> Is there some plan to incorporate an improvement on good ideas from 
> other software?
> Also, I went to the Gnucash site recently and the roadmap, architecture 
> pages are very old.
> They mention 1.6 as the stable release! Is there some plan after Gnome2 
> port and
> converting the backend to a database, to support MySQL and have a web 
> frontend with
> AJAX? I looked at SQLledger and the site feels very dictator-like. It is 
> GPL'd, but the
> manual costs A LOT. Is there a need for web people to keep the GnuCash 
> site updated?
>  I am frustrated that Gnucash updates are so slow, so I am wondering 
> what I can do to
> help in the limited time I can give. What are the biggest needs/hurdles 
> right now?
> How many programmers are really involved in improving Gnucash? I noticed 
> on a
> cvs history page that there weren't a lot of different people committing 
> changes.
> 

I suggest you subscribe to the developers list. 
gnucash-devel at gnucash.org. THere is a lot of traffic right now as they 
push for a G2 release. There are only a handful of developers working on 
it and they are also currently trying to develop a plan to attract more 
developers. developmentally that is.? ;)

I know they are getting ready to put out a series of alpha releases that 
will need heavy testing, and if you're not a developer type, testers are 
more than welcome. If you are a developer type, they'd probably love to 
have you, but be warned, its a BIG project with a steep learning curve. 
But the guys (you are all guys arent you? i think) are helpful. Realise 
that there is probably nothing you could do at this point to speed up 
G2, but you could get your self into it and be able to contribute 
towards the next feature release 2.2.

I speak as if I know way more than I do, but that's my .02 on it all

Andrew
> Sincerely,
> Brian