Update, 10 January 2008: See “related” below for the latest on this topic.
I found myself facing a moral quandary yesterday. I considered using proprietary software for a job that has lots of free software alternatives. You see, I have these doubts and reservations about the free options.
The gravitational pull of 12 years worth of Microsoft Money data has me continuing to run that program on my laptop. I really like MS Money; it’s worked great for managing my finances from when I was an underemployed drop-out living in my Mom’s basement through going back to school, moving out, having a real job and investments, getting married, and buying a house. It has great reporting features: you can really slice and dice the data.
Another potential problem I’ve created for myself is to use classifications in MS Money. (I wrote about this in the linked post.) They’re good for breaking some things down like gas and repair expenses between individual vehicles (as I wrote about previously), and also for tracking a variety of expenses for a “class.” For example, I created a class for our daughter so I can see how much money we spend on her and one day present her with an itemized bill. But this doesn’t seem to be a standard feature in different QIF supporting applications, and I really want to be able to track and report on things this way. (Curses on proprietary extensions! Or maybe curses on incomplete implementations?)
Still, I need to put an end to this regular Windows use. GnuCash and KMyMoney seem to be the main choices for free personal accounting software, but my experiments so far haven’t convinced me to make the move.
Quandary
Yesterday, after getting caught up on a few months worth of money data entry, I thought about Moneydance. I’ve heard good things about it. It’s Java based and runs on Windows, Mac, and Unix-style systems. But it’s proprietary.
Proprietary. It’s only $30, and I wouldn’t mind spending the money, but would it be inconsistent with my belief in free software? Perhaps. I believe software should be free, but we’re in the early stages of moving to that free software world. Proprietary software is here and can still be useful for some purposes. I’ve already accepted that I’ll use proprietary software to make a living. And if free software doesn’t do the job, does that mean we should refuse to use something that will? However, I couldn’t ignore that GnuCash, at least, has been around and has many features, even if it doesn’t do things exactly the way I want. I should do my best to use free software even if it’s not an ideal replacement.
I considered the risk of using proprietary software as my replacement for MS Money. It might offer the benefit of running natively on GNU/Linux, but I could still find myself in a bad place later based on the actions of a single vendor. After going through a big migration to get there, I might have to move again anyway. GnuCash is big enough that it will probably continue to be developed and supported.
But. Still. What if Moneydance made it really easy to migrate from Money? What if it had much better reporting? Maybe I should just try it. They have a trial version.
Sure. Let’s just try it. See what it does. I downloaded Moneydance. Evil proprietary software. I felt kind of dirty. The installer worked great, but I was soon confronted with:
Moneydance End-User License Agreement
END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
IMPORTANT--READ CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THIS SOFTWARE
BY USING THIS SOFTWARE, YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE READ THIS LICENSE
AGREEMENT, THAT YOU UNDERSTAND IT, AND THAT YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY ITS
TERMS. IN ANY EVENT, YOUR USE OF THIS SOFTWARE CONSTITUTES YOUR ACCEPTANCE
AND AGREEMENT TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS HEREIN.
1. GRANT OF LICENSE FOR REGISTERED USERS. Reilly Technologies,
LLC (REILLY) hereby grants you a non-exclusive,
non-transferable, limited license to use the software with which this
license is distributed (the "Software"), including any documentation files
accompanying the Software ("Documentation") solely on a single personal
computer, provided that (i) the Software may not be modified; (ii) all
copyright notices are maintained on the Software; and (iii) you agree to be
bound by the terms of this License Agreement. The Software is licensed to
you and not sold to you. The Software and Documentation shall be used only
by you, only for your own personal use and not in the operation of a service
bureau or for the benefit of any other person or entity. Any use of the
Software, other than as expressly set forth herein, by you or any person,
business, corporation, government organization or any other entity is
strictly forbidden and is a violation of this License Agreement.
2. OWNERSHIP. You have no ownership rights in the
Software. Rather, you have a license to use the Software pursuant to the
terms of this License Agreement as long as this License Agreement remains in
full force and effect. Ownership of the Software, Documentation and all
intellectual property rights therein shall remain at all times with REILLY.
REILLY shall own all right title and interest (including any copyrights,
patents, trade secrets and other intellectual property rights) in and to all
materials licensed by REILLY under this Agreement. You acknowledge that as
between you and REILLY, REILLY owns its proprietary trademark(s) (including
but not limited to Moneydance), and all related trade names, logos and
icons.
3. [...]
Ugh. I read the first clause with growing distaste. I couldn’t agree to this, not even for just trying it out. I clicked “I Decline.” I guess I’ve internalized the desire for the four software freedoms.
I’m not saying I’ll never use proprietary software, but here is a situation where I have clear alternatives that I should fully explore first. And I’m not saying that the Reilly Technologies shouldn’t be able to offer the software on these terms. That’s their business. But I think we should avoid agreeing to these kinds of cumbersome licenses, and work to make them irrelevant.
I’ll admit it can be a tough situation to come up with working business models for free software. I think we’ve seen that it can work, but I don’t think the pay-for-support model is a no-brainer for all kinds of projects. I’d be happy to pay $30 for finance software, but I also wouldn’t automatically pay it out if I didn’t have to. People generally don’t want to spend money if they don’t have to. I’ve donated to several free software projects, but it’s kind of random how I make my decisions in that area.
How do we ascribe value to the work and reward people accordingly?
Anyway, I’ll keep playing around with GnuCash and KMyMoney and may have more to report later.
Related
- (More to report!) Moving from MS Money to KMyMoney
- Microsoft Money to GnuCash (Didn’t happen.)
8 Comments
When you purchase software, you purchase the software, that’s all. It’s a simple, equitable exchange.
A licence simply restores to you a little (or a lot) of what is otherwise suspended by copyright (or patent) for the benefit of the copyright (or patent) holder (in order to incentivise them to publish their work – sell it to you).
You cannot unwittingly enter into a separate/additional contract post-purchase. And the availability of a unilaterally signed contract is not obligatory for you to accept. You can’t be forced to accept a contract simply by dint of installing or using software (this applies to the GPL too).
You have a choice whether to accept the licence (if acceptance is agreeable) or to ignore it. The licence cannot deny your use of the software – since that is what was offered, sold, and what you have purchased.
If you ignore the licence, the only copyright infringement you could possibly commit is the creation of intermediate copies in the process of installation and execution. However, such copies are implicitly authorised by the copyright holder (irrespective of their licence) and probably exempted by the DMCA anyway.
EULAs will try to persuade you that you have bought a useless piece of plastic, and only the opportunity to be a licensee to the software upon it.
You’ve bought software.
You may be patronising an organisation that enjoys the unethical privileges of copyright and patent, but at the end of the day, you’re buying a copy of software, you aren’t condoning or supporting the organisation’s sociopathy. Simply preferring the products of a more enlightened software developer is enough to help the free market favour free software at the expense of proprietary software.
So, if no free software exists that meets your needs, feel free to buy proprietary s/w (or share a friend’s copy), but also offer a bounty on a free equivalent.
It was the suspension of the public’s liberty that helped fund proprietary s/w, so it shouldn’t hurt your halo too much to buy a copy and assert the restoration of the public’s liberty back to it.
31 July 2007 at 6:28 am
These “classes” sound like splits in double-entry accounting. I’m no expert in the double entry accounting thing, but I’ve been successfully running my consulting business using GnuCash for the past 5 years. The flexibility is simply amazing. The downside is that I have to generate a general ledger in html format to give to my accountant at the end of the year instead of just handing him the quickbooks file. He seems OK with that, though.
You can track your daughter’s expenses separately using splits. Create two accounts for gas expense, one is general and the other is your daughter’s. When you do the gas expense entry, split the amount between the accounts. When it comes time to report, just report on your daughter’s accounts and you can see what percentage of the overall expense belongs to her.
31 July 2007 at 9:18 am
Thanks, Crosbie, I always appreciate your take on these questions and find your ideas interesting, even if I don’t fully understand or agree. :-) I enjoy your perspective.
The idea of running whatever software you want to seems proper on some levels, but I still think by spending your money that way you are voting with your dollars in the true capitalist spirit, and I’d rather not vote for the wrong side if I can help it.
Mario: I’m not going to charge my daughter for gas (at least not until she’s driving) :-), but of course it serves as an example.
Let’s go with the gas example where I want to track total gas expenses and between two different cars. It looks like I can create sub-accounts indefinitely, so that I might have:
automobile:gasoline:car1
automobile:gasoline:car2
Now is it easy for me in reports to summarize at the gasoline level and see where I spend $1,000 (say) in a year, or break it down to see that I spend $600 on car1 and $400 on car2?
Furthermore, I might want to report across multiple accounts and see only ones that have a certain 2nd subaccount, so for example I can look at automobile:repairs:car2, automobile:maintenance:car2, etc. Or look at all of these combined so that I see the total for gas, repairs, maintenance.
In MS Money I know how to create tabular reports with a variety of choices for rows and columns (categories, subcategories, years, etc), but so far (and I haven’t dug very deep yet) I don’t see this flexibility in GnuCash. I suspect it can do what I need to do, I just have to learn.
31 July 2007 at 3:55 pm
Scott – I don’t know if you and Mario know one another, but that is a perfect example of what I do appreciate about free/open source software. Community.
31 July 2007 at 6:07 pm
GnuCash has two ways of reporting.
The canned reports available under the reports menu allow you to generate text and graph reports based on data from multiple accounts. For example, the Expense Bar Chart report allows you to chart your expenses over time. The first tab (named “Accounts”) in the options allows you to select the accounts you want to report from. Lets say you have a top level account called “Transport Car” with sub accounts “Gas”, “Service”, and “Parking”. And let’s say you have another top level account called “Transport Van” with the same sub accounts as the car. On this panel, you simply select the top level account and the sub accounts you want to report on. Note the “Show accounts until level” drop down. If you select “2″ in the drop down, you’ll get a bar chart of the individual accounts. If you select “1″, then it will sum the subaccounts and present this under the labels of the top level accounts.
The other way to report is on the contents of a single account. When you select “find” from the “edit” menu, the results get posted into a new tab. You can report on this tab. Let’s say I create a results tab by searching the Fuel account for my car for all the gas stations on Richmond Road. I do this by searching against the Description field. I can generate a simple report on this by going into the “Reports” menu and selecting “Account Report”. Now I know how much I have ever spent on gas for my car on Richmond Road. To limit the date range, rerun the search with more criterion, such as start and end date.
I think GnuCash can do what you’re looking for pretty much out of the box.
Now, the canned reports have been good enough for what I need out of them, but hey, this is open source, so you can write your own reports, or modify the canned reports to do what you want. I seem to recall seeing a description of the language used to create these reports on the website and it didn’t look very hard. There’s probably a how-to floating around.
The default format for data storage in Gnucash is XML. If you need reports that are more powerful than what GnuCash can do, you can implement a sql backend. I don’t know how good your sql is, but there’s tons of power to generate reports there.
1 August 2007 at 11:46 am
Thanks, Mario. You’re helping to convince me that GnuCash will do the job.
I’d be happy to write my own reports and am comfortable with sql. I wasn’t sure how much I want to invest up front in this area — haven’t found that information about the reporting — maybe just enough to assure myself I’ll be able to eventually get the information I want. You’ve given me some ideas to try.
Then I can decide if it’s worth trying to manually enter in all the “classification” data from MS Money. (Pretty sure that won’t import, and would probably be more effort to figure out a way to automate than is worth it to me.)
2 August 2007 at 8:58 pm
This free accounting software is not limited or a trial version. There is even a CPA who supports and helps you customize it. Open source is ok but motivated is better.
8 November 2007 at 8:31 am
I looked briefly at your web site, where I didn’t see any screenshots and not much information about the actual software. I didn’t bother dig enough to figure out if this is a standalone client or “Software as a Service.” This is free “as in free beer” software?
You’re offering something that is not really free (as in the ability to take and modify and redistribute and use the software for any purpose), supported only by you, and you think it would be better to entrust all of my financial data to this venture? I should use a service/software where I can’t take and continue to maintain it myself if you go away or stop supporting it?
I think I’ll stick with *free* software that has a community of users and developers around it.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion, but you’re deluding yourself if you think a free software advocate would have any interest in what you’re “selling.”
9 November 2007 at 12:52 pm