LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 05, 2002

Coming soon: gnucash 1.8

When attention turns to what Linux needs if it is ever to attain desktop World Domination, the first thing that comes to mind is usually office suites. But personal and business finance software is also an important part of a desktop system. The state of the art for Linux financial applications has always lagged far behind what can be found in the proprietary world, and that deficit certainly does not help get Linux onto more desktops.

The leading free finance package for Linux is gnucash. LWN has looked at gnucash a couple of times in the past, and your editor has used it for his (depressing) finances for almost three years. Gnucash gets the job done, but it long lacked the features found in commercial finance programs; it has also never been something that could challenge small business packages like Quickbooks. The gnucash developers have not been idle, however; much work has gone into the 1.8 release, which is due to hit the net on January 5. When the 1.7.4 beta release was announced, your editor grabbed a copy to see what the gnucash team has been up to.

gnucash 1.8 will have quite a few new features, including:

• Scheduled transactions have long been at the top of the gnucash wishlist. At last, gnucash will keep track of upcoming transactions and help you put them into the register (or do it automatically) when the time comes. The gnucash interface for scheduled transactions takes a little getting used to, but it's highly functional. About the only feature your editor missed is the ability to generate a projection of future account balances based on the scheduled transactions.

• gnucash finally understands mortgages and other loans. Combined with scheduled transactions, this feature makes it easy to track loan balances, escrow accounts, etc.

• Small business accounting is now part of the gnucash feature set. gnucash will now track customers and vendors, run payable and receivable accounts, generate and track invoices, etc. There is also basic support for per-customer terms and tax tables. LWN is currently looking for a Linux-based accounting package (suggestions, anybody?), so we are highly interested in the new gnucash features in this area. Unfortunately, it does not seem that gnucash is really ready to run businesses quite yet. Documentation of the business features is lacking (though that may be fixed up by the 1.8 release), numerous problems remain (i.e. you can't put your company's address onto invoices in anything but image form), and important features (i.e. payroll) are lacking. But things are heading in the right direction.

• Open Financial Exchange (OFX) support - at least for import. gnucash 1.8 also support the Home Banking Computer Information protocol, which is used in Germany. We were not able to test out these features.

• Improved documentation, which is now packaged separately. The quality of the documentation is improving, but numerous holes remain.

• More and improved reports. You want pie charts, or nice listings of just how much your stock portfolio has lost? gnucash will do them for you better than ever.

As a personal finance application, gnucash 1.8 is truly ready for prime time. All it needs is a few rough edges filed off, and a small set of additional features (i.e. budgeting), and it will be fully competitive with the proprietary packages.

As a business accounting package, gnucash has some ground to cover yet. This is actually an interesting state of affairs: gnucash has had many of the basics, such as double-entry accounting and an (almost undocumented) PostgreSQL backend, for a long time. Conversations with the gnucash developers indicate the the new gnucash business features are the results of a single developer's efforts. Can it be that the free software community is unable to come up with the resources to build a top-quality business accounting package on top of a proven platform? We should be able to do better than that.

gnucash will eventually be able to address the business market - the code has been slowly but steadily getting better for years. In the mean time, there really is no need to use proprietary packages for personal finance; gnucash 1.8 will be more than good enough.

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Linux and mobile telephony

The cover article from the November 21 issue of The Economist argues that the future of computing is to be found in the combination of handheld systems and cellular telephones. Together, the two provide mobile, convenient access to applications with worldwide communication capabilities. It is easy to see how, if the applications are available and the user interface issues are solved, this type of system would become the computer of choice for many users. Servers and desktop systems will not go away, but personal handheld units may well outnumber them.

One might ask how this is relevant to Linux. At a first glance, it's not: there are no Linux-based mobile telephony systems. The embedded Linux vendors seem to be far more interested in set-top boxes than telephones, and the mobile industry has its own options for operating systems. Linux, it seems, runs the risk of being left out of a large sector of the future computing market.

This market, instead, looks to be the site of a battle between Microsoft and Nokia. Microsoft has a version of Windows which has been tweaked for the mobile environment. The company does not, however, have a whole lot of customers at this point. The mobile phone makers, for some reason, are reluctant to give Microsoft a toehold in their market. The fact that the Windows source is not available to licensees also does not help. Microsoft has an uphill road ahead of it, but it also has the resources to stay the course for a long time.

Nokia, interestingly, is not pushing a mobile operating system of its own. Instead, along with Ericsson, Matsushita (Panasonic), Motorola, Psion, Siemens and Sony, Nokia is a part owner of Symbian, which licenses its software to all of them. Symbian OS is developed with the needs of its owners in mind, and comes with source code. In other words, the mobile handset makers appear to have set up their own little private, members-only open source-like community to handle their operating system needs. It seems to have worked; Symbian is the dominant operating system in mobile handsets.

How could Linux push its way into this market? Much work has been done to make Linux work well on handheld systems; see, for example, the Familiar distribution. What's missing, however, is any sort of telephony support. Getting Linux to the point where it can make a call on a mobile telephone will require a great deal of work interfacing with proprietary hardware, and, perhaps, dealing with numerous regulatory bodies worldwide. It will not happen, in other words, without strong support from one or more handset manufacturers. That support does not appear to be present at this point.

It is not that hard to imagine a future world where mobile handsets have become a commodity item (i.e. cheap even without a service plan), and handset manufacturers have been reduced to producing low-margin platforms for Windows. In such a world, there would likely be sufficient interest to inspire funding of a Linux-based alternative. It sure would be nice, however, to not have to wait that long. All of us who have worked on free software have not, after all, done that work just to carry a proprietary operating system in our pockets.

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LWN Status Update

Here is this week's report from LWN.net; read on for the latest in subscriber counts, and for information on potential opportunities for those who might like to write for LWN.

The LWN individual subscriber count still stands a little shy of 2400, almost unchanged from a week ago. That is mixed news - the frequency of subscription expiration has gone up, but, so far, new subscriptions have kept the overall count from dropping. We have, however, definitely hit a plateau with regard to subscription levels.

If you are still trying to solve you holiday shopping needs, you could maybe help yourself and LWN by giving LWN.net gift certificates.

Parts of this week's Weekly Edition may be a little thin due to one editor being distracted by (non-LWN) issues. Things will hopefully be back to normal next week.

Partly inspired by these issues, we are looking for ways to bring more authors into the LWN.net fold. We are in no position to hire anybody, to say the least, but, with luck, we should be able to split out a small amount of money to pay for externally-written articles. If you have good English language writing skills, are interested in writing about free software topics, can deal with short-term deadlines, and are willing to deal with extremely picky editors for very small amounts of money, we would like to hear from you. Please drop us a note at authors@lwn.net, and we'll talk. Please don't submit actual articles until we've come to an agreement.

Thanks, as always, for supporting LWN.net.

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