So I had to know both Quicken & Money from the inside-out.
I used to work for the CoreStates Bank PC banking department before they were bought by First Union. Open Source has its advantages, to be sure, but if a commercial product can maintain high-quality without it, then what's the problem?
There is no need for all software in the world to become open source. The important thing about GnuCash is that now more people can abandon Windows (or Mac) and move to Linux/BSD/anything that can binary emulate Linux. Quicken does not hold the key to some important internet or multimedia protocol. Quicken is not like a web browser or a word processor, where the file formats it uses determine what all the other software on all other OS's must conform too. I see the purpose of projects like this as knocking on the commercial developers heads and saying, "Hello! Anyone in there? There's a good market out here that you're going to completely miss." If Quicken had already been ported to Linux, then GnuCash wouldn't be very important at all. It's to insure high quality in critical software. What's so great about that scenario? The goal of open source is not to put commercial software out of business. Make money because we're such nice people." So I would expect that in a few years, Intuit will be saying, "Well, it's not GNU Cash, but it's still pretty good, and if you buy it, we No, it couldn't unless someone sabotaged the kernel.īTW, I could go on and on about how QT/KDE is really better designed than Win32, but that's another topic in itself. You can run KDE, or GNOME, or the bloat-whiners like yourself can even run TWM and use Xterms. However, there will always be a key difference - in Linux, you can choose. Well, hopefully, there'll be no difference between Linux and Windows in terms of ease of use. Will there be a time when there's no distinction?
With KDE and GNOME, the desktop is almost as easy as Windows. The main problem with Windows is that the core operating system itself is unreliable. I wouldn't complain if all of those apps ran on Linux. The problem with Windows is certainly not the fault of the applications that run on it. It is a robust, well designed operating system. Linux is not and will never be a windows clone. Regardless of what applications you choose ( and in linux, you can choose ) to run, the underlying operating system is extremely robust. So, now that everyone is making Windows-type applications or porting them right over, what's to keep Linux from becoming a Windows clone?