Out of curiosity...

[Michael Hendry]

> On 2 Dec 2014, at 04:37, Steve <butterandsalt at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> My question was sincerely posed with NO other accounting package in the back
> of my mind, or that I'm considering, or in my imagination; I was just
> curious how successful anyone has been, in trying to export GnuCash's
> structure and data to ANY other financial program.  Was a simple question.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have an exit strategy for any software package that involves long-term storage and manipulation of data.

I use three Open Source applications to which this applies:

LifeLines - a public-domain genealogy package
Shotwell - image management
GnuCash - book-keeping.

Lifelines has survived a journey from Windows, through Ubuntu and now to iMac. It uses GEDCOM - a standardised way of exchanging genealogical information developed by the Church of the Latter Day Saints - and I can export to and import from other genealogy programs using it.

Shotwell was available for Mac and Windows at first, but is now only available for Linux. I’ve invested a lot of time in tagging and organisation of my images, and now I’m using an iMac I have to use a Virtual Machine running Ubuntu to maintain my image collection. I’d like to have some means of exporting all the metadata to another platform, but so far this appears not to be available.

It strikes me that the double-entry aspect of book-keeping is sufficiently standardised for a system of export and import to be practicable for the transactions themselves, but there is a lot of information in a Gnucash file that would be hard to transfer to a common import/export format.

I too have no plans to leave the Gnucash fold.

Michael