QBXML import

[John Ralls]

> On Mar 18, 2016, at 8:19 AM, Andrew Moise <andrew.moise at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>   Hi John.
>   I don't agree with you about the legal issues; simply reading a file format is totally different from duplicating a full language API, and reverse engineering is perfectly legal within certain boundaries. Notably, reverse engineering for interoperability is absolutely legal (as long as you don't do something otherwise objectionable while you're doing it). Any proprietary software vendor would generally prefer that competing software not be able to read their file formats, but that doesn't mean it's legally prohibited. Some court cases showing legal and illegal examples of reverse engineering are here:
> 
> https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq#faq6 <https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq#faq6>

The cases where it was held to be legal were those where no EULA or ToS prohibited reverse engineering, so you win that point. However Intuit's EULAs and ToSes do prohibit reverse engineering.

In general I take the whole of the reverse engineering FAQ to support my position that it would be legally risky to publish a QBXML importer without a license from Intuit, and that license would prohibit distributing source code.

> 
>   Of course it's not for me to say what legal risk you're willing to expose yourself to. I can understand the point of view of not wanting to entangle a good project into something which could have negative repercussions for it. Has Intuit shown some kind of indication of wanting to pursue legal action against people who try to read their data format?

I don't know of any public cases where Intuit went after someone for infringement, but then such cases tend not to be publicized unless they both involve well-known companies and are likely to make it to court.

>   I do have some data in QBXML format that I'd like to get into Gnucash. I might do the stylesheet or some similar work to get my particular data into a useful format for me.
>   Thanks for your work on Gnucash and the quick response.

You're welcome.

Regards,
John Ralls