Re: [PLUG] Netraverse LUG Sponsorship Program

[Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com>]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 08:35:46AM -0500, Tobias DiPasquale wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-12-16 at 08:21, Kevin D. McAllister wrote:
> > I have heard from quite a few business types that the following
> > have no adequate replacement under linux or even MacOS X
> > 
> > - Intuit QuickBooks
> > - Goldmine/Act for advanced contact management
> > 
> [...]
> > And btw GnuCash is not currently an adequate replacement for
> > Quickbooks.
> 
> IIRC, there was an article on Freshmeat some time ago about this very
> topic. Check it out:
> 
> http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/269/
> 
> Who knows? You might like something you find there. ;-)
> 
> Financial software doesn't get as much attention in the OSS community
> because of its rather low technical difficulty level and its association
> with "suits". But, there are plenty of OSS programmers that have to do
> their taxes and the like out there, so you can be sure that these apps
> are as high-quality as the rest.

I have been using gnucash for the last year. It's not as good as
quicken, it's just linux native and free (GPL). That said, it's good
enough for me and my needs, and I've learned to accomodate it. But I
found out at the same time that Quicken runs under Wine, so that's
another way to avoid running Windows if Quicken is the deal breaker.

One of the lead developers (the lead developer) of gnumeric is also
head of a quantitative group at a bank/trading firm in Chicago. His
needs have driven a bunch of the development of gnumeric. It now
supports a huge amount of excel-like stuff, as well as a nice plug-in
architecture like excel. I'm hard pressed to find things that excel
does that gnumeric can't, although I'm sure there are corner cases
that effect a small number of people.

In some business settings, you get compatibility cycles: we use
Windows because we subscribe to Tibco (a financial data service),
which provides an excel plug-in, and won't support us when problems
happen unless we're using Windows. But for most people that sort of
thing isn't the issue, it's can they read their colleagues
spreadsheets (and vice versa).

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>
 GPG fingerprint: 1A1A BA95 D082 A558 A276  63C6 16BF 8C4C 0D1D AE4B

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