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loss leader?loss leader?Posted Jan 13, 2005 19:51 UTC (Thu) by peace (guest, #10016)In reply to: loss leader? by ccyoung Parent article: Quasar Accounting under the GPL
If Linux Canada is using it as a "loss leader" I don't see the problem. The accounting package is quite good and is GPL, which should satisfy any purist, so I'm not sure where your problem lies with them.
We use Quasar to manage our small business books and do sales quotes and invoices. It has been an excellent product, much better than what the anti-business GNUCash had to offer at the time. I know GNUCash has recently added business features but I haven't taken a look recently. Quasar is client server/multi user with permission management which has been very helpfull. It also has a redimentary concept of workflow which makes it easier to use and train on than some other options. Our accountant likes it too.
One thing that Quasar is lacking is good reporting though. I hope that the GPL'ing of their code will help with that.
I don't get the sense that they are doing this as a 'ploy'. I think it simply makes great business sense for them as it will get them onto to distro CD's where they can potentially get some market penetration in the developing Linux as POS system area. I have been wishing they would do this for several years. Thanks Linux Canada!
Kind Regards
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loss leader? Posted Jan 13, 2005 22:35 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] I'm not sure that I would describe gnucash as "anti-business", but I can assure you that I would describe it as "anti-sanity"--if you've ever tried to install it from source, you know exactly what I mean. Building quasar was a breeze... a most refreshing change.
loss leader? Posted Jan 13, 2005 23:35 UTC (Thu) by peace (guest, #10016) [Link] For quite awhile GNUCash resisted adding any business related features. they were quite vocal about _not_ wanting to include features specific to business users as they felt it would complicate the product for home users, which they considered their desired audience. I'm not faulting the developers or GNUCash but I think that that decision ended up hurting the project in that it isolated them from a very active, needy and committed user base. It was actually quite a strange thing for them to do as they would also state at the same time that one of the aims of GNUCash was to develop an "enterprise" class transaction engine for ERP type accounting. Anyway, for quite awhile it did feel like the developers were anti-business as they would activly discourage suggestions for things like invoicing and customer management. Things that GNUCash is now starting to include.
As for being anti-sanity I do seem to remember running into a lot of tricky library versioning issues when I tried to compile from source. But most distributions include it in their package system so it's easy to install. Hopefully Quasar will start showing up as well. Good to hear Quasar compiles cleanly though.
Kind Regards
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