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GnuCash - A Call For Help
sedition writes "GnuCash developer Benoit Gregoire has written the State of the GnuCash Project. It is a call for help to the Open Source community regarding the open-source accounting software for Linux, Mac OSX, and more. GnuCash is one of the largest (287,853 lines of code), but least publicized Open Source projects. Now it needs developer support, as its future is uncertain."
How did it get so many lines of code if it isn't very well known? Do we have one coder slaving away on this one?
I personally like the idea of having alternatives to proprietary software.
Maybe you could write a sort of "Why-To" - explain to people why to use a double-entry system like Gnucash as opposed to single-entry systems out there.
You could give folks some good advice as to what sort of accounts to set up so that when tax time comes around, they can better track what's what.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Why is Gnucash unpopular? Because 3 out of every 4 people I've talked with who've wanted to try it couldn't satisfy the dependencies for their distribution (most of these people aren't newbies to Linux either.)
That said, it truly is in a league of its own in the Linux software world, and I hope it finds what it's looking for in new developers.
Disclaimer: I haven't used it for a year or more, so it may have overcome some of this already
Damn, imagine what I could do with a quarter of a million lines of python code. Seriously C is a great language for systems work, but writing accounting packages in C is just not the way to go.
Got Code?
Maybe with a financial donation? Perhaps the GNUcash people could set up a pledge system where a bunch of folks can promise to pay some money and then when a certain number of pledges are made, everyone donates their part. The "keep GNUCash alive" fund or something.
And before anyone says that paying for open source software is backwards, remember that you're paying for software freedom. That is, you could spend $100 on a commercial accounting program for one copy, or you could spend $100 on GNUCash and have unlimited copies, plus way better support (you get to talk to the developers themselves, they actually listen to your feature requests, etc). Which would you rather have?
Most folks can't hack code. And even if they can, most projects have enough coders (remember what they say about too many cooks). However, the remaining 99.99% of the population can easily help by simply donating money. Not code. It's ok that you can't code. In fact, they'd rather you didn't. OSS projects need m-o-n-e-y.
Potential? GnuCash _works_. It has 250k lines of code written already. Frankly, it's one of the best Linux apps I've ever used, and has a very sane interface. Then again, I've never used Quicken, so what do I know?
Why you're advocating throwing away a perfectly good program that just needs some more developers and documentation is totally beyond me. A dedicated documentation effort for GnuCash would probably only take a month to do, max.
If I had to hazard a guess, you're not a software developer. Re-inventing the wheel every ten minutes is a bigger waste of time than trying to fix a slightly old, good one.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Hmm, I'm wondering how does Red Hat makes money. They sell only open source software. WAIT! Wait!!!! What did I say? They sell some free software!!!?!?!
Excerpt from the GPL:
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I am not sure what affords GnuCash the title of "least publicized," as I've heard the title many times and infact it came with RedHat whenever I last installed that.
/. that two major things keeping me away from using Linux is the lack of any sort of decent finance management software and an Outlook-type thing. My whole life is in MS Money and Outlook.
Some months ago I said on
I heard things about GnuCash being hopeless to install unless it came packaged with your distro, so I was excited when I found out that the version of RH about to come out will include it.
Thus began my most-recent attempt to switch to Linux. I exported my Outlook archives into Evolution, and my Ms Money accounts into GnuCash.
It lasted about a week. By the end of the week I was thoroughly dissapointed with the mediocrity of both of the pieces of software. Yes, they are usable. yes, GnuCash added up numbers together, but no,the user experience was mediocre compared to what I was used to with my Microsoft applications. That, and the shitty sound support, eventually made me say "fuck it" and switch back to Win2k and I'm happily using it since.
I think most everyone agrees that GnuCash is a critical piece of software for the Linux desktop. Yes. Absolutely....
GnuCash is a long program (well at work we deal with about 150 times that much code..) but from a user perspective of someone who's known better, it sucks. I am glad that the focus isn't only to find more coders. What this thing needs is some normal human beings using it and saying "you know what, it's NOT acceptable that window A obscures window B and freezes while window B is waiting for input from me." It needs, I am sorry to say, Quicken or MS Money users, who say "It was really easy to do X, Y, and Z, but here, I can't even figure out if it's possible,"
Good luck to this project, absolutely. Maybe - evnetually - projects like this will mature and become useful to people who don't care about open source and don't hate Microsoft. Yes, GnuCash appeals if you're maniacal about those things. It does not appeal if you're looking for better and more useable software. Unfortunately, a lot of Linux stuff can be described thusly.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
I was thinking of writing the exact same thing.
:)
If it were in Python, I might volunteer to help myself.
Seriously, can anyone name ONE SINGLE advantage that C (or even C++) has over Python for this type of app? Certainly, Python is fast enough -- so what if it has to cycle through all your records once in a while. That's not going to take all day. With C/C++ you have to worry about all kinds of low level crap like buffer overflows. You shouldn't have to think about that kind of thing when writing applications that involve business logic. You should only have to focus on the application logic, something Python lets you do much better than C/C++ does.
I gave up on trying to use GnuCash long ago due to the impossibility of compiling it, and getting it to run.
Yes. I am an economist turned coder. I understand investment theory and accounting, I've been building enterprise software for the past decade, and I have been looking for a finance/accounting project to hack on in order to add support for high-end investment management problems. GNU/Cash seemed ideal until I tried to build it. Bah! These guys don't seem to have any real experience with software design of medium sized systems.
GC needs to broken up into smaller pieces that can be independently studied and built with limited dependencies on external packages. I should be able to build a command line accounting system using a base set of transaction libraries without needing to have much else installed except the libs and precompiler for my chosen backend database. Same for reports. They should need only the db support libs and an XML lib for parsing XML defined reports. Everything else is just GUI convenience or eye candy.
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