Hello GnuCash developers and users, On behalf of the members of ParIT Worker Co-op, I'm pleased to announce the launch of Bo-Keep as a public/community free software project. Bo-Keep is a desktop application that makes use of the python bindings feature found in GnuCash 2.4.0 and 2.4.2.
http://bokeep.org/ Bo-Keep has always been free software (in development for years) -- what we are doing today is proclaiming that version 1.0.1 sufficiently demonstrates our vision, is good enough for us to actively solicit contributions, closing our cathedral, and opening our bazaar. To quote our website """Bo-Keep helps you keep your books so you don't get lost Bo-Keep allows you to create custom data entry interfaces for accounting software, speeding up data entry and reducing errors. The system uses front-end plugins for data entry interfaces, and back-end plugins to connect with various accounting programs. """ Our only useful back-end plugin right now is for GnuCash. We'd like to be very clear on this next point -- we at ParIT and the Bo-Keep project are *not* attempting a re-write of the GnuCash user-interface in python. GnuCash provides an incredible amount of powerful general purpose accounting and bookkeeping features. We could not dream of being able to replicate them easily. (and wish plenty of good luck to those with experimental projects that are trying) GnuCash excels and delivers on generality -- what Bo-Keep seeks to provide is a platform where user-interfaces can be easily constructed for specific, narrow data entry needs. Because of the training threshold required for double-entry book-keeping, we hope this will allow organizations to offload common bookkeeping tasks into the mode of pure data-entry in order to achieve better entry speeds, reduce training time and reduce errors. Thus, we see BoKeep as a companion application/platform for GnuCash (and eventually other accounting programs), its power and generality will not be obsoleted. To take BoKeep out of cathedral mode and into bazaar mode, we have applied to have all aspects of the project (website, mailing list, revision control, bug tracking) hosted on Savannah: http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?10927 Until that goes through, we're welcoming participation on the temporary mailing list : http://parit.ca/mailman/listinfo/bokeep-devel and our own subversion repository remains open to read-access. http://svn.parit.ca/bo-keep/trunk/ Someone might be thinking, "why launch this as a separate project, why not submit for inclusion in GnuCash?". Our intention with Bo-Keep is to not be tied to GnuCash specifically. We think it will flourish best as a separate project with separate goals and a separate identity. As it stands right now, Bo-Keep can run and do useful things without the GnuCash backend plugin. It would make sense to copy some small pieces of Bo-Keep and the Bo-Keep test suite into GnuCash, as we have some pretty decent tests for the GnuCash back-end plugin which uses the GnuCash python bindings behind the scenes. If someone prepared a patch for this, ParIT would consider a request to license those specific files under GPL v2 or at your option any later version so they could be included in GnuCash. (see post-script on our use of GPL V3 for Bo-Keep) Happy Hacking, Mark Jenkins Member ParIT Worker Co-op p.s. BoKeep is licensed under GNU General Public License version 3, or at your option any later version. We respect the license of GnuCash http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/browser/gnucash/tags/2.4.2/LICENSE and understand that we probably have to come up with a patch to upgrade all the "V2 or at your option any later" and "V2 or at your option V3" files in GnuCash to say "V3 or at your option any later" and "((V2)/V3 only" so we and others can distribute GnuCash and Bo-Keep together. (Folks can privately use the two together right now without concern) If a v3 upgrade patch isn't desired in GnuCash (you still want to give people the option to use new versions under V2), it still might make sense to commit it to a branch here. I'd be willing to keep such a branch in sync with the joys of svn merge. If you're wondering why we'd go to this effort to do everything with GPL V3 when we could just license Bo-Keep as v2 or at your option any later, read this: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
