Question Regarding Sending Invoices Via Email

Buddha Buck blaisepascal at gmail.com
Fri Sep 13 10:57:45 EDT 2013


On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 10:40 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Jack,
>
> Jack Halem <jack at dlxcompany.com> writes:
>
> > It continues to amaze me - how can anyone complain about a free open
> > source program.
>
...

> > On 09/13/2013 07:05 AM, Buddha Buck wrote:
> >> Is it a sign of dedication to purpose or a sign of slow development
> effort
> >> that, after 15 years, GnuCash has refuted Zawinski's Law: “Every program
> >> attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot
> so
> >> expand are replaced by ones which can.”
>
> I believe that this was meant as a joke.  At least *I* took it as a
> joke.  I don't think it was a jab at GnuCash development, but more about
> the fact that this question has been asked several times over the years
> but nobody has offered to implement the feature.
>

It was a joke, as was Zawinski's Law (it's a Murphy's Law type thing).  I
don't think jwz intended to imply that his "law" was necessarily a good
thing, but rather a cynical observation about the state of software
development.  I suspect he made the observation around the time that
Mozilla Navigator, the web browser he's most famous for writing, started
adding mail features (eventually spun off into Mozilla Thunderbird).

GnuCash started out as a basic personal double-entry accounting tool.  15
years later, it's still, at it's heart, a very good basic personal
double-entry accounting tool, with some business-oriented features grafted
in.  It has not become a jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none double-entry
accounting toolkit that can send and receive email, as Zawinski's law would
predict.  It has also not been replaced by other accounting tools, as
Zawinski's law would predict.


> But thank you for supporting us.  :)
>


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