Disable editing of transactions, is it possible?

[Colin Law]

On 18 January 2011 12:38, Mike or Penny Novack
<stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:
>
>>>  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.

It is even easier than that, all one has to do is edit the data file by hand.

Colin