Groklaw - Digging for Truth

	When you want to know more...

Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines

ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

You won't find me on Facebook

Donate

No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.

What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments

Sponsors

Hosting:

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster

Why isn't there a FOSS replacement for Quickbooks? Anyone? | 221 comments | Create New Account

Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.

3rd party vert apps (developer dovetails with Windows Upgrades,forcing users to keep paying fee)

Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 07 2012 @ 04:54 PM EDT

The game played that is played along with Window, is support
for the 3rd party applications is more than likely tied to a
version of Windows.

For example... Windows XP is still supported for Quickbooks,
as Microsoft is still supporting it. But, when MS drops
support for XP, then Intuit will as well. Meaning, that if
you want support you need to be upgrading your Quickbooks at
least as often as your version of Windows support expires
(and with Intuit, it is their wish that you pay again and
upgrade at least about every 2 years to keep current with
the versions that they support).

If someone did a LINUX version, that didn't need or was not
dependent on such support models, then they better price
their upgrade and support game cheaply enough to entice the
business to subscribe to support.

That is the game, just that the Linux folks in the
Small/Medium Business area have not taken advantage of it,
due to the already entrenched user base of Windows
applications.

Now, I Ubuntu wanted to get ahead, they would join up with
another distro, and buy out Intuit, and make a Linux version
of Quickbooks (with payroll and charge per year like Intuit
for tax table updates, patches etc... still offering the CD
method of updating the tables and patches as there are many
Intuit Quickbooks installs that do not let their machines
ever touch the internet at all.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Why isn't there a FOSS replacement for Quickbooks? Anyone?

Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, September 08 2012 @ 02:22 PM EDT

Depending upon the definition that is used, there are FLOSS replacements for QuickBooks.

Issue #1: Your SOHO/SMB accountant probably has not heard of it, and will charge more to look at data from your software;

Issue #2: FLOSS software typically has not been certified by government agencies or national bodies. Individual organizations can, and do get their specific fork/varient certified, but that certification does not carry any further than paying clients;

Issue #3: The FLOSS alternatives to QuickBooks are either limited by industry or geography. They are forks of the "mainstream" FLOSS accounting packages.

#Issue #4: Payroll functionality will probably never get beyond the data required by ADP. (If you have more than four employees, and don't use ADP, or a similair vendor, the gaurantee is that one will fall afoul of the rules. If ADP is used, they cover the fines, etc, provided they were given accurate data.)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )