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SBT (now owned by AccPac) accounting software runs on FoxPro and Visual FoxPro. Many many companies run this, and the support of these systems is a good business to be in.

The strange thing is that just yesterday I was commenting on how FoxPro was all but ignored by Microsoft.

Anyway, that's who still uses it...

BBSes were the precursor to the Internet, for home users at least. Sure, universities could exchange among themselves, and CIS sucked our bank accounts down like a runaway pr0n habit, but BBSes allowed the everyman to connect to others online, chat, leave messages, learn, download, upload and all that good stuff (a decade or more before the Internet became popular) -- all without being charged for it.

RBBS was the king of BBSes for a long long time, with good reason. Widely distributed on floppies, impressively documented and configurable -- yet Basic-coded to fit in
Like Fortran, Basic had its time, place and purpose -- and still does. Only problem is that simple languages are hard for Microsoft to make money from. With ridiculously complicated languages they can crank out new, incompatible versions like clockwork and everyone must follow in goose^H^H^H^H^Hlock step.

Another also-ran is FoxPro, almost impossible to even get the darn thing, no printed docs, few third-party manuals -- yet SBT, among other things, depends on it. If only it paid to perfect things (and people)...

I'm planning on eliminating AccPAC

Accpac supposedly runs on Linux as well.

URL:http://www.accpac.com/products/finance/accwin/ accpaclinux.asp

Dunno whether it's any good, though, or whether the buyout by Sage will affect anything.

Well you could use Accpac for example. They've got full Linux support. In my last job I migrated a client's smallish business from a pure Windows shop to pure Linux (they ran Accpac on Win before moving to Accpac on Linux). Its honestly getting to the point where you can do it unless you have specific software requirements. With Evolution, StarOffice and the other drop in replacements for MS software retraining is relatively minimal. My boss was ultimately annoyed though because we lost a fair bit of revenue from the client which used to come from the Windows desktop support.

Can your accounting package run on a Linux server with windows clients?
With a staff of over 25,000 people, surely one of them could set up a redhat box?

I guess not.

After 3 years of admin and modification work on Visual Foxpro / SBT I grew to hate it. Until I was exposed to Oracle...

Microsoft (Great Plains)

And of course Oracle, and peoplesoft, and RealWorld, and American Business Systems, and a couple of hundred others. How could they be so foolish? Just wait until people realise that all they need is a spreasheet :)

Accpac has a great accounting package and has been around in commercial distribution for a long time (I knew someone who used the Windows version back in the late 1980s). It was recently released for Linux.

Accpac has a great accounting package and has been around in commercial distribution for a long time (I knew someone who used the Windows version back in the late 1980s). It was recently released for Linux.

I don't live in the US, and I never will. But from what I have heard, AccPac performs the same role (ubiquitous SME accounting software) that MYOB does in my own beautiful country, Australia.

AccPac have a Linux port.
* It seems to be software you can get competant accountant with many years experience using, minimising training costs and staff overtime while necessary to move to a new system
* It has a fairly good reputation and large amounts of existing systems
* it can import data in a wide variety of formats from its competitors.

It's not Open Source, but it might be the best tool for the job, which should be any competant technical persons criteria for selecting software.