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

[Marc Paré]

Hi Bradley,

Thanks for your comments,

Le 2013-08-27 13:32, Bradley M. Kuhn a écrit :
> 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.

Perhaps the reason for this is that many of the open source accounting 
packages were put together in EU states and not the US. But personally, 
I think a Canadian implementation would resemble more that of a US 
version than anything else.

>
> 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.

I hope that it all works out then with this approach. I personally would 
have liked to see more of an international push, but this is my personal 
opinion on this. While I agree totally with not having to "reinvent the 
wheel" once again, I am personally interested in the GUI that is 
adopted. I hope a more familiar GUI is adopted or at least something 
that comes close to that of a known package such as Quickbooks or MYOB 
(my personal preference). As many organizations (such as ours) are 
driven by volunteers and in many cases, some smaller groups have not 
enough income to hire an accountant. A GUI with a short learning curve 
will at least give these groups a running chance at figuring out the 
accounting process without having to fight with a confusing GUI.

>   
>> >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 believe that you can still get the Quasar 1.4.7 in some Linux distros 
repos, but you can download the 1.4.7 version from their site here:  
ftp://ftp.linuxcanada.com/pub/Quasar/1.4.7/ (some binaries are made up 
for when that GPL'd version was available, but the dependencies are most 
likely outdated).

As far as the license not being revocable, at the time, the Quasar devs 
wrote to the community that they were no longer going to develop code 
for the GPL'd version, although they do generously allow the use of 
their present version to anyone for free, which, for the most part was 
taken in good faith by most everyone using the software. Regardless, the 
GPL'd code from the 1.4.7 version could still be used as a starting 
point at least for the GUI part as well as its implementation of double 
entry, and, as an added bonus, the software is still being developed, 
and, the devs are quite approachable. Again, they may even be convinced 
into helping out.

I would have to ask them again why they quit producing their GPL'd 
version, and, am not sure if they just restarted all the code form scratch.

It would seem to me that, taking a step back, there could be room for 
negotiating good relationship with the Quasar devs and trying to come to 
some kind of mutually beneficial relationship. If the look and feel 
seems interesting to this project, as well as the accounting code, then 
it would most likely be helpful to approach them. You would really have 
to try their latest version of Quasar to get a feel for what the package 
can do.

>
> (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
Yes, I agree with the first part of your comment, but I don't believe 
their intent is to "sully the good name of Linux" as they actually will 
produce binaries of different Linux distros of Quasar (the latest 
version) if asked nicely. They are quite supportive of the Linux 
communities. But, yes, I do agree that perhaps the "LinuxCanada" label 
may infringe, although, I seem to remember that this discussion had 
already been taken up somewhere on another discussion list and had come 
to some kind of assertion where the name was cleared.

On another note, thanks for taking on this project as this is one of my 
"pet peeves" where, at least here in Canada, our arts organizations 
receive some considerable amount of government funding income, but that 
when it comes to the non-profit accounting process, that, more often 
than not, a large portion of our revenues are spent on either fund 
accounting software (mostly Quickbooks with annual costly updates) or 
hiring an accountant/agency with fund accounting specialization. I have 
been pushing the idea here that the various government agencies should 
band together and help create an open source accounting package that 
could be made available to our NPO's. However, I would rather now see 
this supported on a larger international scale if the SFC project is 
going that way.

Thanks again for your comments.

Cheers,

Marc

-- 
Marc Paré
NBBP Director
Treasurer/Marketing
Marc.Pare at notabenebaroque.ca
http://www.NotaBeneBaroque.ca
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