Disable editing of transactions, is it possible?

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Tue Jan 18 07:38:17 EST 2011


>>  Adding an option to make transactions
>>read-only/disable editing may seem unnecessary, in fact the only purpose
>>of this would be to make the software available to Swedish accountants in
>>smaller firms and organisations. If one would want to cook the books this
>>feature will do nothing what so ever to stop him, but this feature would
>>make the software comply to Swedish law. 
>>    
>>
Misunderstanding what I was saying?

Perhaps the Swedish lawmakers need to call in Swedish systems analysts 
to explain this to them.  I was saying that no software CAN be compliant 
with "prevents the data from being altered". What such software COULD do 
is prevent that alteration unless other (unrelated) laws and civil 
restrictions were violated in the process. Thus the terms of your 
license with some commercial software product likely says that you are 
not allowed to examine the code and/or internal data formats and may not 
use the code for other purposes of your own.

But that's not "in the code" but in the licenses.

Let me try to make this clear. Let's suppose that the developers did 
exactly what you suggest, created a "Swedish version" which had a line 
of code that disabled the edit transaction process. But this is OPEN 
SOURCE SOFTWARE. Are we to suppose that Swedish programmers/analysts* 
are too incompetent at their craft to be able to create a "slightly 
modified" version to be used when one wanted to edit the data? This 
isn't a task of writing an entirely different version of the program but 
changing just a couple lines of source code and recompiling.

The only way I can interpret the law in this case is making OPEN 
SOFTWARE illegal for accounting purposes.

Michael D Novack

* or ones elsewhere anywhere in the world who for whatever reason wished 
to do this and offer their version to Swedes

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-- 
There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality of the grave.



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