David -- for all of us little guy entrepreneurs -- I say "AMEN" to your comments. I converted from Quicken to GNUCash about three years ago -- and I have never looked back and have saved enough $$ to buy a whole of things I would not have been able to!
A BIG THANK YOU! - to you and the whole GNUCash team for all you do! -- Ken -----Original Message----- From: gnucash-user <gnucash-user-bounces+pyz01=cox....@gnucash.org> On Behalf Of David Cousens Sent: Friday, February 1, 2019 1:40 PM To: gnucash-user@gnucash.org Subject: Re: [GNC] GNUCash becoming unusable ..v3.4 Diane, I think you have missed a few points about GnuCash. GnuCash is not a commercial program maintained by a company to make a profit. It is a totally volunteer effort to produce and maintain and document GnuCash. GnuCash is free - you will not be charged for the bugs. As in most of the Linux world, you can generally be sure if something is broken, i.e. it stops the program from working or produces significant errors, it will get fixed pronto. If it is inconvenient in a major way it will get some priority. If it is a minor inconvenience or can be worked around it will be a lot lower down the priority list. All programs suffer to some extent from scope creep in that there will alsways be a user who will want it to do something that it wasn't originally planned to do. GnuCash has one brake on this - no one is paid to make it happen. If you want it and no-one else involved in the programming needs it as much as you do, then you had better live with it as it is, find a product which better meets your needs or start to learn how to program.. No matter how good a programmer you are, you will never get any significant program working flawlessly unless it virtually does next to nothing. (That's behind a major ideal/principle in the Linux world of doing one thing and doing it well). Fully accurate and documented software, if it ever exists, requires a decent integrated team of fulltime programmers and documenters (these are ususally paid, hopefully well paid, and don't generally have other full time jobs). GnuCash is admittedly not that well documented. There are a variety of reasons for this including a small core development team who really don't have time to do detailed documentation, which is left largely to some of the user base. Most of us have not written the code, some of us have some programming experience not necessarily on GnuCash. Inevitably this leads to delays while new features get documented, and unfortunately some never get documented formally. if you want to use Gnucash you will need to trawl through the archives of the User forum and the Wiki where a lot of newer features are usually "documented" first. You will also likely spend some time asking questions on the forum until you are familiar with the way Gnucash works and have found out how to td the things that you knew how to do in some other software that GnuCash does a bit differently. Gnucash is Opensource software built largely using open source libraries for specific functionality. If it were not the relatively small volunteer development team would be unable to maintain it. In some cases progress is limited by the rate at which development occurs in the underlying libraries. This is not unique to GnuCash - many commercial programs also use the same or similar libraries. Whenever a new library version is introduced, despite the best efforts of the library developers, there is a risk that a slew of new, usually minor, bugs will be introduced. This alone occupies a lot of the developers time. The core of GnuCash which deals with its integrity as an accounting program is fairly solid. It is generally far more flexible than other commercial accounting software I have used. It's ability to edit transactions directly usually means you can do virtually anything you need to be able to do, but you will have to understand what you are doing, not just follow a procedure you have no control over. This means GnuCash is not for everybody. If you can't live within the above restrictions then it is possibly not the program for you. If you are running a commercial enterprise of reasonable scope, you can generally afford to pay for commercial software and to have it customized to meet your specific requirements. GnuCash really fills a niche where this is not necessarily the case. David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
