Quicken to GnuCash (Windows) (Charles Day)

[Charles Day]

On Dec 4, 2007 10:33 AM, Andrew Sackville-West <ajswest at mindspring.com>
wrote:

> I think that just highlights what I think the general problem
> is. Gnucash isn't written to secure the data that might be used by
> gnucash. It's written to handle that data. It's up to the user to
> secure that data. Personally, I much prefer securing my own data with
> methods I understand and to my own gut-check-level. Much better than
> (one of) the alternatives -- having the app secure it in some manner I
> don't understand and possibly can't recover it from.
>

Andrew, why would the application's security methods be a mystery? It's open
source. Gnucash would not have to do the heavy lifting anyway; it would
probably just have hooks into a well understood and scrutinized open source
library. Using it could be optional. I can understand the argument not to
take this up based on priorities and limited resources, but not on
philosophical grounds.

You probably have a better grasp of security issues than most of your users
hope or care to have. Leaving expert users to free to roll their own
security is great, but I would guess that most users are not going to do so
(if even capable) and would prefer to have it provided at least to the
degree available in alternative finance packages. As gnucash evolves and the
user base expands to less computer-savvy users, this issue will become more
prominent than it is now. I suspect that most people participating in this
discussion are programmers who can go the do-it-yourself route, but some
methods require integration with the application itself.

A potential benefit...It is currently a real pain to download the online
transactions for 10 different accounts with 10 different passwords one at a
time; is there any plan to someday cache those passwords so that I can
download all the transactions at a click, or at least a click plus a cache
password? It would be a really nice feature from a usability standpoint -
but right now that password cache would be nearly naked while gnucash is
running, if not 24/7.

I see from the developer mailing list that there has been some discussion of
moving toward a database backend - do any of the backends under
consideration offer data security built in? If so, maybe you can get this
functionality for free at some point.

Just my .02 as well... thanks for all the advice everyone!

Cheers,
Charles