On 18/10/2016 09:56, John Ralls wrote: > >> On Oct 18, 2016, at 8:13 AM, Paul Phillips <p...@patchpitch.com> wrote: >> >> Hi John, >> >> Indeed it is a shame, and I regret causing the discord and suspicion. >> Please accept my apologies. >> >> Thanks for your insight and the link to the SFC. I shall get in touch with >> them. >> >> The only other way of engaging with the GnuCash project without the need of >> either a contract or management oversight is to create a fork. It would >> therefore obviously be completely optional whether the dev team adopted any >> of the changes. But if the fork development matched the Gnucash roadmap and >> project guidelines, the chances of merger would presumably increase. >> >> However the key to enabling this to succeed is the user base, and as a fork, >> the user base starts from scratch. >> > > Paul, > > There are forks and then there are Github forks. The latter is one usual way > for "outside" developers and documentors to contribute, submitting their work > through a Github pull request (which is a bit different and much easier to > use than the traditional git email pull request used by the Linux project. > > The other kind of fork is what happened with Open Office a few years ago: > Unhappy with the way Oracle was managing the product, a large chunk of the > development team took the code base and created a new product, Libre Office. > I think that's what would have to happen with a "commercialized" GnuCash: The > "commercial" team would have to create a new product to work on to guarantee > that the paid-for work actually gets released in a product. > > I've put "commercial" in scare-quotes because the new product would still be > limited by the provisions of the GPL and the GnuCash project would be able to > merge any changes that they liked into the Free version. Both because of that > and the limitations of the GPL the "commercial" entity would have to find > some other way of monetizing the product; that's normally done on open source > projects by selling support. IMO that's a hard nut to crack: Developers, > documentors, and managers are expensive and the "commercial" entity would > need a pretty hefty cash-flow; a reasonable-sized team might run as much as > $1M/year once overhead is included.
Drifting a bit I've wondered more than once about the relationship between GnuCash and KDE's KMyMoney https://kmymoney.org/ looks like that was forked -- Wm _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
