Intuit Finally Offers Some Support For Linux

walterbyrd sends us to the ZDNet blog, where Dan Farber & Larry Dignan write: "Intuit said Wednesday it will allow QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions to operate on Linux servers. For Intuit, the move is a bit of a milestone — QuickBooks is the first of its products [to] work on open source software."

Comments

It's the client, not the server we need

[Shadoglare]

How many people really care about the server back-end when it comes to something like Quickbooks? Very, very few. The fact that neither Quickbooks nor Peachtree will run under Linux is a HUGE stepping stone for anyone who wants to use it for small business purposes, and this does very little to fix that.

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[BlakeReid]

If a Linux Quickbooks client ever surfaces, prepare to wait for version parity. We just tried to switch our accountant over to the Mac version of QB 2007 from Windows 2006 and within a couple of days he had a page-long list of missing features and deal-breaking bugs. Thank the lord for Parallels.

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[LWATCDR]

This is Quickbooks Enterprise not Quickbooks and yes it does matter.
The company I work uses SAGE for it's accounting but we us Linux for our servers... Except for the one that runs the accounting.
This product is for medium size businesses not small business. So yea it is a big deal.
I think a Linux version of Quicken would be great Dell could sell it. A Linux version of Quickbooks would also be nice for small companies. But for Quickbooks Enterprise the server side is the logical first move. Lots of medium sized companies would like to use Linux servers but are still using Windows Desktops. Thank you SAMBA.

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[einhverfr]

We, on the LedgerSMB project are working really hard at addressing this need. For the average small business owner, it is not to the point where the software is easy to install and set up, and it still requires some hand holding. But within 1-2 years, I expect we will have an open source competitor to Quickbooks and Peachtree which will handle every business well from zero to several hundred employees.

Right now, the software is suitable to those who really want an open source solution, but once we get to 2.0... Come join our community and help make this happen. :-)

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[Shadoglare]

The only "native" equivalent software I've found so far (and I've looked extensively) is a product called MyBooks from Appgen: http://www.appgen.com/aptus/my_books_professional_ linux2.htm However, the linux version is a client/server product, meaning you have to have a server running in the background to use the program, even if it's being run on one machine. I tried out the Windows version which was decent, but for the life of me I couldn't get it to work right on my Linux box and didn't feel it was worth struggling with. In the end I gave up and decided to use GnuCash for the books and OpenOffice for inventory tracking.

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[einhverfr]

Agreed on your points. However, when you say "Sage" I am sure that is as descriptive as saying "some program made by Intuit." I assume you mean Sage 500?

However, there is no reason why one cannot have a darned good accounting engine which could work for both small and large businesses (perhaps with alternate user interfaces). The major obstacles to such a solution have been the willingness to depend on proprietary database technologies which add a huge cost barrier to small businesses. There is no reason why this has to continue.

One of the major focuses of LedgerSMB has been the development of such an engine and the ability to have alternate user interfaces. We are not to this goal yet, but we do have an accounting solution that is likely to be of interest to the open source community and will shortly be a viable competitor to Sage 500 and MS Dynamics/Great Plains. I have actually been involved in one migration from Dynamics and am involved in one from Sage 500 at the moment.

At the same time, as we head towards 2.0, we expect to be able to make the user interface far more suitable for smaller businesses. I hope that within two years, we have a program that can compete extremely favorably with everything from Quickbooks Basic to Sage 500. That is a tall order, I know, but we have a roadmap to get there.

People who are interested in this are certainly welcome to join our community and help make this happen.

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[Craig Maloney]

I have a shelf of Linux software that proves you wrong. I've paid for copies of StarOffice, Applixware, WordPerfect, Crossover (back when it was just a Quicktime plug in), MoneyDance and much more. The simple truth of why I'm not spending money for StarOffice anymore is because of OpenOffice does the trick for me, so I haven't upgraded past version 6. True, Linux has a reputation for trying to do things on the cheap, but to say that nobody will spend money for a Linux solution is quite offensive to me. If a product exists, and it isn't priced at some usurious rate (like Quicken for Mac vs. Quicken for Windows), then people will pay for it. (and before someone gets on my case about Quicken vs. Quickbooks, yes I know they're two different products, but I haven't had an opportunity to price them between Mac and Windows).

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[ducomputergeek]

See, this is not the experience I had when I worked for a small software house several years ago. We seriously looked into porting some of our applications to Linux since we were small players on Windows and there was not a lot to offer in our market on Linux.

So we ported one of our applications to see what the viability would be and offered a free version and a pro version for a fee. I think we maybe sold around a 100 pro copies for Linux out of 6200 downloads, but we ran into a lot of problems. Tech support was a bitch. Now things have improved, but at the time we developed for RH and SuSE, but we got emails with: "This won't work on Slackware, or Debian, or pick your version here." Trying to explain we only supported RH and SuSE only tended to make people mad. That's not to mention the amount of email we got lecturing us why everything should be "free". Now, sure we had clients that paid

The windows version had 11,000 versions and about 3500 users that upgraded to the full version. To put it mildly, the Linux market was too small to make it viable because it consumed at least as much time to answer tech support questions as it did for Windows and the user base was 35x's larger. Eventually someone did develop a small application that did about the same thing as ours for free/oss and we ceased development on linux before the company was bought out and disbanded. We had a better product, but what we found when reading what customers told us (when they did) was they'd take second rate free for Linux over paying for something of quality.

Sorry, that was just the first hand experience I had. Personally I got tired of it and bought a Mac in 2002 and have been on OSX ever sense at home and work. One of my reasonings was, "Hell I can run GIMP and my fav. *iux apss and get Microsoft Office and other commerical software." Now there are folks like you, and me (I'll spend the money if it's worth it), but those numbers in the Linux desktop market are very few and unless it's something special, aren't enough to make it a viable market for many appliactions. Again it's chicken and the egg. More people won't develop Linux until there are more desktop users. And people won't use Linux until theirs more applications for it. That was how it was 5 years ago and it's still that way.

Finally!

[gEvil (beta)]

Finally, a product that allows all the F/OSS zealots to keep track of all the $0.00 software expenditures that they've racked up...

Intuit = Dark Empire

[Anonymous Monkey]

As an accountant that knows a bit about computers I would like to say. I DON'T CARE! We use QuickBooks at work but it dose not mean we like it. QuickBooks is downloading patches and calling home as much as Windows. If you want to use it's 'advanced' features like e-mailing invoices they want you to use Intuit servers.

I know, I'm a bit paranoid. But I work with computers and accounting. Paranoia is part of the job.

More about the momentum.

[jshriverWVU]

To me this news is more about the momentum of yet another big company hoping to support at least something on Linux. Server side, I don't think QuickBooks will matter much, a client would be more fitting. However what this shows the market is, hey maybe Linux isn't so bad, besides X, Y, Z is supporting it maybe we should.

I'm just hoping this effect builds more momentum till the day when Adobe released a 100% compatible version of Photoshop and Premiere for Linux.

Re:More about the momentum.

[rsmoody]

I agree, and for my place of employment, this could be a nice thing. We have many clients that can barely afford the license for QuickBooks period, much less a server OS to run the backend on. Thus, what happens is, it gets installed on a workstation, which is not the best of ideas. Now, we can just point them to a less expensive server with RedHat, or heck BSD if it will work, and save them some money if all they are needing is QuickBooks and a file/print server.

And at one time, it was running there

[WindBourne]

I taught there several times back in the 90's. I was told by several ppl that they had the client running on Linux. Problem was that the marketing ppl were fighting it being there (as well as on the mac). They felt that MS would treat them right and that they had to be ONLY on windows. Marketing ppl are so short-sighted.

Y'all are missing the point

[drinkypoo]

Okay, so it's a server, not a client. Have you forgotten all lessons taught by Microsoft? While we all like to decry the weakness of monocultures, we all also like them at least on some levels. The most important one, and the one that really brought Windows success as a server platform (hint: it wasn't that it was a better server) is familiarity. Operating Windows and Windows NT has always been similar, with slight lapses here and there (like NT4 trailing Windows 95) and this is precisely how they gained a share of the server market.

Linux has until recently been the only company gaining market share in the server market, by taking a little away from Windows and a lot from Legacy UNIX(tm). But Windows has [recently] been making headway of its own. This scares (or at least bothers) me, because I want to live in a future with less Microsoft in it, not more. But anything that gives Linux more of a boost as a server inevitably increases the chances of running Linux on the [corporate] desktop as well, which has positive ramifications for everyone but Microsoft.

One small step.....

[Mystery00]

However small, at least it's a step in Linux's direction, maybe it'll catch another company's eye and help them decide to support Linux. The more proprietary support Linux has the better and one day Linux will run anything you could want, which is what an OS should strive to do.

Re:A good thing...?

[jedidiah]

BULL.

Intuit is one of the major kill app vendors. They're one of the first companies to come up when someone wants to whine about some altOS not running some critical piece of Windows software.

Landscape designer and most of the other crap you see at CompUSA is much less relevant.

Re:quicken with wine

[morgan_greywolf]

Yes. Older versions of Quicken run okay if already installed (the installer doesn't work right).

WINE still needs lots of TLC before it will mature enough to run something that needs to run very reliably, like Quicken. Personally, I use Quicken under a Windows 2000 version running under QEMU on top of Ubuntu 7.04.

Forget the Linux support, Intuit needs actual

[einhverfr]

presales customer service.

I have a customer who is trying desperately to move all servers away from Windows (they currently run Sage 500), so I called up Quickbooks (the number the sales report said to call) for information as to when Linux server support would be available. They refused to answer any questions unless I had a support account. I suppose they are not interested in getting migrations to happen.

I suppose I cannot recommend such a product to my customer.

GnuCash

[DaveJay]

When I finally convinced my wife to let me manage the money, I moved over to GnuCash (she was using Quicken.)

The learning curve was steep, not because of the app itself (though a bit) but because I didn't truly understand the basics of accounting. This is something that Quicken does a good job of preventing people from realizing.

The help docs were *fantastic*, and I learned a great deal in a short time. Now that I use GnuCash, I have a much stronger understanding of where my money goes. Couldn't be happier.

I realize that's slightly off-topic, but it seemed a good time to mention it.

Quicken 5 for DOS runs GREAT under FreeDOS

[mcrbids]

For Intuit, the move is a bit of a milestone -- QuickBooks is the first of its products [to] work on open source software."

Ok, Quicken IS NOT Quickbooks. But for a decent, simple-to-use checkbook manager, Quicken is hard to beat. It's incredibly user-friendly, and the ancient version I have, version 5.0 for DOS, works great on FreeDOS. I use it all the time, Quicken 5 on FreeDOS on Linux via SSH in Xterm. (no kidding!)

This lets me do my books anytime, anyplace where I can get an xterm or putty loaded. (pretty much EVERYWHERE) Since it's done everything I've ever needed for my personal checking accounts, why would I use anything else?