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

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Tim,

Tim Schofield wrote at 07:37 (EDT) on Tuesday:
> I am a member of the team developing the KwaMoja
> (http://www.kwamoja.com/) ERP system in Africa. The project is
> released under gpl v2.0.
>
> This project is a fork of the webERP project.

Thanks for getting in touch with our project and joining our mailing
list!  I was indeed aware of webERP, but not of its forks.

> I believe we can meet all of your needs, 

I took a brief look at your website, and I didn't see any features
specific to fiscal sponsoring and non-profit reporting.  Did I miss
this?

In fact, the demo seems to have many of the same assumptions that most
for-profit focused accounting packages do.  Namely, it thinks of things
in terms of sales, customers, etc.  I've attempted many times to
browbeat such systems into fitting a non-profit structure but haven't
been successful.

Is there something specific about your codebase that you believe makes
it particularly adaptable to non-profit work, particularly compared to
the many other accounting codebases out there (including webERP itself)?


Meanwhile, I'm curious why you say on your website: "Has the facility to
use third party plugins, both commercial and open source."  That almost
seems to indicate that Open Source can't be commercial, and of course,
an no license would be OSI-approved as an Open Source license if it
didn't permit commercial and non-commercial activity equally.  webERP's
license is GPLv2, so if you're a fork of webERP, you'd be bound by the
same license.

Perhaps you actually mean proprietary plugins there, not "commercial"?
If so, I'd be surprised at that too, since a GPLv2'd license codebase
wouldn't typically permit proprietary plugins:
   http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins

Can you clarify your licensing situation?
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy