LinuxCon: funding development [LWN.net]

Conservancy runs only Free Software for its own operations

Posted Sep 7, 2012 17:44 UTC (Fri) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link]

akumria, Yes, for internal operations, Conservancy uses only Free Software. We don't impose this rule on our projects per se (although we urge them to). We wont' accept a project that develops proprietary software, but if they use proprietary software in said development, we bug them about it and try to get them to change, but we don't mandate that. After all, Samba developers have to test against Microsoft's stuff to make sure their code works.

But, that's admittedly a special case. A better example is that many of our projects use Eventbrite for registration to their conferences hosted by Conservancy, and many use Github to host their projects. Both platforms are proprietary network services (including installing proprietary Javascript onto your machine when you use them). I make our projects aware of this issue, but if they want to use these services, Conservancy doesn't forbid it. We recently had a project (the discussion is public) that's considering using a proprietary CI system as well, which we urged them not to but ultimately won't stop them if they do.

Meanwhile, for internal operations, Conservancy is 100% Free Software shop. njwhite is correct that Ledger has been a big part of that since around 2007 (when we switch to it from GNUCash). Conservancy is actually doing some upstream work with Ledger now (as of this week) to initially add some reporting scripts to contrib/. Long-term, we want to have a web interface that will allow a bookkeeper without Unix CLI and Emacs experience to keep the books. (I currently keep the books of Conservancy myself; in part because of that issue and in part because we don't have funding to hire a bookkeeper anyway. I'm working to solve the latter (please donate :), but the former will still be a problem even if we get the funding.

Conservancy runs only Free Software for its own operations

Posted Sep 10, 2012 21:33 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> Long-term, we want to have a web interface that will allow a bookkeeper without Unix CLI and Emacs experience to keep the books.

Have you tried hledger-web? A demo is available[1]. I uses ledger's data format (but doesn't support everything), but it might[2] be easier than starting from scratch.

[1]http://demo.hledger.org/register
[2]Depends on Haskell/Yesod familiarity.

Conservancy runs only Free Software for its own operations

Posted Sep 11, 2012 13:55 UTC (Tue) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link]

hledgerweb really supports only a small fraction of what ledger can do, and the most important thing is an extra-ledger issue: it needs to use a repository system on the backend for it to be useful at all to Conservancy.

Conservancy runs only Free Software for its own operations

Posted Sep 11, 2012 18:40 UTC (Tue) by clint (subscriber, #7076) [Link]

There is a somewhat-low-priority project to add an optional filestore backend to hledger-lib (which would introduce support for Git, Darcs, and Mercurial). Presumably when ledger 4 is rewritten in Haskell, it could do the same thing.

Conservancy runs only Free Software for its own operations

Posted Sep 16, 2012 15:53 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I'd certainly be interested in a git-backed hledger. I store my files as:

main.journal # Include $year.journal
$year.journal # Set the year, include $year/$month.journal
$year/$month.journal # Sorted by effective date then by account

in git. Having hledger do auto-commit when things balance would be great since the commits tend to just have messages like "Receipts up to $date" and "Reconcile with $account up to $date" anyway.