Hello. NB I am not familiar with the details of the TurboCASH situation so my commentary is based only on the content of the wikipedia page and my own experience with small, windows-only software that has migrated to free licenses.
Sounds like TurboCASH just needs time and patches. The developers and the community should not be punished for their dependency on non-free software. It sounds like they aspire to eliminate those legacy dependencies. There was this non-free game for PC called Descent, back in the mid nineties. (It wasn't called a non-free game back then, it was just called a cool game!) At some point, the source was re-licensed as free software, but not the artwork, and the build depended on non-free compilers. For a year or so, folks who had access to those compilers were releasing binaries, new builds of the game, and all along they were also working to make it build under gcc. Long story short: they eventually succeeded and many derivative projects have been created, including http://packages.debian.org/unstable/d2x-rebirth . Free Software Supporters are one thing, and Fans are another. TurboCASH has Fans. Many of them might not be radicals. But some of them must be, because they've declared their intent by re-licensing the application under GPL. Ok, now I've looked at http://sourceforge.net/projects/turbocash/ and their wiki and I see that they have a very long path ahead of them. :P Quiliro, if you chose another accounting product over TurboCASH due to some failure on their part to adhere to free-software principles or some technical issue, please describe your choice in the form of a bug report: http://sourceforge.net/p/turbocash/bugs/ If you would like help with the language of the bug report, contact me directly or via this mailing list. Cheers, --Hobbes On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 11:39 PM, Quiliro Ordóñez Baca <[email protected]> wrote: > > > El dom 19 ene 2014 00:17:21 ECT, Mike Gerwitz escribió: >> On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 12:07:27AM -0500, Quiliro Ordóñez Baca wrote: >>> What do you think about this? >>> >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboCASH#Criticism >> >> There is unfortunately no reference describing the situation; could you >> summarize it for us and maybe provide some details about the environment >> needed to compile the software? >> >> Some clarification is also needed regarding this line: >> >> TurboCASH has also faced criticism from some open-source advocates, as >> commercial applications are required to compile TurboCASH. >> >> ``Commercial'' does not imply non-free, though I suspect that this is the >> case here? >> > > That is exactly what I am Trying to find out. The idea is to check if > it requires non-free software for running. > -- > Saludos libres, > Quiliro Ordóñez > 600 8579 >
