Status on NPO Accounting project: Conservancy seeks a contractor to begin work

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Marc Paré wrote at 15:40 (EDT) on Monday:
> I have also been trying to push the idea here in Canada with some of
> our local funders who have ties to national funding agencies. I think
> you should do a little more with suggesting that the software will
> also be tailored to different country specs.

I really want to have non-USA people involved in the project and
watching what we're doing to ensure we don't make a design decision that
will make it difficult to reuse.  (Or, better yet, co-developing the
software with us and working on non-USA depoloyments.)

However, the reason we're focusing on USA non-profit accounting needs
first is because I've noticed that many of the existing software projects
make design decisions that preclude adapting their software easily for
USA non-profit use.

I'm assuming that designers of Free Software accounting systems know
what they are doing, and I thus suspect that it's a substantially tougher
software development task to make an accounting system flexible enough
to handle use-cases under other types of accounting procedures.  So many
systems I've surveyed briefly really are only appropriate for a
USA-based for-profit business and not useful for much else.  Some are
configurable by jurisdiction, but that's usually special-case code, and
they still end up for-profit biased.

This is in fact one of the reasons I'm a fan of Ledger CLI, as it treats
the double-entry accounting part merely as the "math part" of accounting
and imposes no restrictions.  I see people reimplementing double
entry accounting over and over because they don't treat double-entry
accounting as a math library.  (It's akin to seeing every person who
wants to write geometry applications reimplementing geometric math to
their specific needs instead of using a math API).

Ideally, we'll design a system that doesn't repeat *that* mistake, but
we'll surely make a few mistakes and/or bad assumptions.  We just
have to try to minimize them, and you can help by staying involved
and watching what we're doing!

Thus, while I am really glad you're here on this list and hope you'll
watch our progress and make sure we're not make bad international design
decisions, I don't think it's good for us to use international plans as
a component of fundraising (yet).  We just don't want to overpromise to
funders.
 
> BTW ... although it is a little "out-of-date", you may also want to
> look at the Quasar Accounting package code for when it was open
> sourced,

Thanks, I'll add it to the (huge) list I'm keeping of known Open
Source/Free Software accounting systems. :)

> the devs took it back out of open source after having it out there for
> a couple of years.

Not sure what that means, since Free Software licenses aren't revocable.
I think you mean something else other than they revoked the license, but
there are a number of situations I can imagine that you might describe
with that text above.

Anyway, I *can* discern that you mean there is at least a version of that
code legitimately under a Free Software license floating around.  Do you
know where?  It's obviously not on their homepage anymore. :)

(I must admit I find it quite disturbing that a company named "Linux
Canada" is primarily a developer of proprietary software.  That sullies
the good name of Linux. :)
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy