[GNC] GNUCash becoming unusable ..v3.4

[David Cousens]

Diane,

I think you have missed a few points about GnuCash.

GnuCash is not a commercial program maintained by a company to make a
profit. It is a totally volunteer effort to produce and maintain and
document GnuCash.

GnuCash is free - you will not be charged for the bugs. As in most of the
Linux world, you can generally be sure if something is broken, i.e. it stops
the program from working or produces significant errors, it will get fixed
pronto. If it is inconvenient in a major way it will get some priority. If
it is a minor inconvenience or can be worked around it will be a lot lower
down the priority list. 

All programs suffer to some extent from scope creep in that there will
alsways be a user who will  want it to do something that it wasn't
originally planned to do. GnuCash has one brake on this -  no one is paid to
make it happen. If you want it  and no-one else involved in the programming
needs it as much as you do, then you had better live with it as it is,  find
a product which better meets your needs or start to learn how to program..

No matter how good a programmer you are, you will never get any significant
program working flawlessly unless it virtually does next to nothing. (That's
behind a major ideal/principle in the Linux world of doing one thing and
doing it well).

Fully accurate and documented software, if it ever exists, requires a decent
integrated team of fulltime programmers and documenters (these are ususally
paid, hopefully well paid, and don't generally  have other full time jobs).
GnuCash is admittedly not that well documented. There are a variety of
reasons for this including a small core development team who really don't
have time to do detailed documentation, which is left largely to some of the
user base. Most of us have not written the code, some of us have some
programming experience not necessarily on GnuCash. Inevitably this leads to
delays while new features get documented, and unfortunately some never get
documented formally. if you want to use Gnucash you will need to trawl
through the archives of the User forum and the Wiki where a lot of newer
features are usually "documented"  first. You will also likely spend some
time asking questions on the forum until you are familiar with the way
Gnucash works and have found out how to td the things that you knew how to
do in some other software that GnuCash does a bit differently.

Gnucash is Opensource software built largely using open source libraries for
specific functionality. If it were not the relatively small volunteer
development team would be unable to maintain it. In some cases progress is
limited by the rate at which development occurs in the underlying libraries.
This is not unique to GnuCash - many commercial programs also use the same
or similar libraries.  Whenever a new library version is introduced, despite
the best efforts of the library developers, there is a risk that a slew of
new, usually minor, bugs will be introduced. This alone occupies a lot of
the developers time.
 
The core of GnuCash which deals with its integrity as an accounting program
is fairly solid. It is generally far more flexible than other commercial
accounting software I have used. It's ability to edit transactions directly
usually means you can do virtually anything you need to be able to do, but
you will have to understand what you are doing, not just follow a procedure 
you have no control over. 

This means GnuCash is not for everybody. If you can't live within the above
restrictions then it is possibly not the program for you. If you are running
a commercial enterprise of reasonable scope, you can generally afford to pay
for commercial software and to have it customized to meet your specific
requirements. GnuCash really fills a niche where this is not necessarily the
case.

David Cousens



-----
David Cousens
--
Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html