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.

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...

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.