Kuali Financial System

[Joshua Gay]

Hi NPO Accounting list!

First off, let me say that I am really excited about this project and I
think the approach the Conservancy is taking to get it off the ground is
awesome.

The first topic I wanted to bring up is the Kuali Foundation
(<http://www.kuali.org>) and the Kuali Financial System (KFS).

To give a brief overview here is a couple of paragraphs from the
foundations website:

"The Kuali Foundation enables colleges, universities, and commercial
firms to achieve their collective objectives via open source
collaboration. The foundation is not a vendor. It provides an efficient
way to pool investments and achieve sustainable software at a total cost
of ownership that is superior to all other options. That is a bold
claim, and institutional evidence is mounting to prove its veracity.

    The foundation is now home to eight projects (Financial, Research
Administration, Student, HR/Payroll, Middleware/Workflow/Identity,
Library, Business Continuity Planning, and Mobile) that are in varying
stages of maturity. The most mature project, Financial, is now the
institutional financial system for colleges large and small, hosted on
premises or SaaS, and with a number of commercial support providers.
Research Administration and Middleware/Workflow are also mature and
installed fairly widely across the country."

Kuali Foundation also collects contributor agreements and also tries to
deal with all legal, trademark, and licensing issues on the software and
on behalf of partner schools and orgs.

Here are some links to the financial system:

* KFS: <http://www.kuali.org/kfs>
* KFS source: <http://www.kuali.org/download/kfs>
* KFS test drive: <http://testdrive.kfs.kuali.org/kfs-ptd/portal.do>

I also think the HR/Payroll system may be worth looking into:

* Kuali People Management <http://www.kuali.org/kpme>

All that being said, I don't really have an opinion of how useful the
software actually is, but, I suspect it is worth looking into.

One warning is that I recall that last year when I was reading through
one of the documentation wikis I think it was under an NC license. So,
I'm not sure if *everything* is under a free license.

Josh
PS. is there some sort of wiki where I should be putting this kind of info?

-- 
Joshua Gay
Licensing & Compliance Manager
Free Software Foundation