Exploring the possibility of better NPO support in LedgerSMB

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Chris,

Chris Travers wrote:
>    I am the most active developer in the LedgerSMB project and would like
>    to offer assistance for phase 0 evaluation of this software for a
>    possible NPO accounting system.

I really appreciate that you've joined this mailing list.  Indeed, LedgerSMB
is one of the many projects on our list to evaluate as part of Phase 0 of the
project, and in fact did spend 3-4 weeks evaluating LedgerSMB in 2008 along
with many other options for Conservancy's needs.  Like all the systems I
evaluated, I believe that five years of development certainly demands a fresh
look at every option, which is why Conservancy drafted our plan to include
Phase 0.

At this point, the discussion is focused on building a criteria document and
evaluation checklist, and just collecting the list of projects that should be
evaluated, so I suspect we won't initially have many questions about
LedgerSMB.  However, assuming the fundraising campaign is successful and
Conservancy is able to bring in a staffer to begin the evaluation work, I
believe that having folks from individual projects under evaluation will be
very helpful.

The last thing I will add is that even the early threads on the mailing list
show that there are a *lot* of accounting systems as Open Source and Free
Software, which Conservancy was in fact aware of before launching the
fundraising campaign.  I think your point is particularly salient when you
say that none of the systems are currently attractive to the NPO community.

But, Conservancy also doesn't want to restart from scratch unless that's
shown clearly to be absolutely necessary.  While I don't think it will be,
there is a lot of competition of what codebase to choose.  At some point, I
was going to have to say this explicitly, and now is the moment: this
project will have to make a hard decision about which codebase to use, and
there *will* be people who are unhappy about the selection.

I have in my mind that I'd actually like to consider the possibility of
merging two or three of the options in some interesting way if we can find a
way to do it without making the job even harder.  But, in the end, we certainly
can't pick 22 different codebases to start from, and there are at least 22
options on the list already.  Thus, we can predict that at least 19 projects
are going to be unhappy with the outcome.  I don't know which 19 projects those
will be in advance -- so the best I can assure you is that Conservancy is
committed to doing Phase 0 wholly in public and transparently, and we welcome
constructive criticism throughout the process.
--
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy