Just sent this rant about PBooks to a colleague:
It might make sense to release the basic accounting system as AGPL (which requires a "download source" button on publicly serviceable websites, but not for corporate lans) and then have a more conservative or commercial license for the more sophisticated modules designed for medium to large sized businesses. In this way, small business owner's or start-ups can use the software for free and will likely contribute back to the core. Also, commercial services would then be able to offer the service for a fee, coupled with data entry bookkeeping and accounting services, and only have to provide a download for the base AGPL-licensed package, and can purchase licenses for the higher level packages if they like, and even modify them without having to release or contribute back the modifications. PBooks is still at stage one, of clarifying the data model and functionality scope. Once that is established, I can draft an API for integration. My biggest complaint about most open source accounting packages is that they include so much other functionality irrelevant to core accounting, like CRM, user management, billing, inventory, etc. While an accounting package may not be very useful on its own without any of that other stuff, it must be good enough on its own to merit potential integration with other packages - which is what I believe will ensure its success as an open source project. One thing I was working on last night was the ability to get account balances at any certain time so that the key feature of bank reconciliation will be more usable. I made some minor changes to the code over the past couple of weeks and will be updating the demo soon, and I've asked a good friend of mine who is an experience CPA (retired, but still got the itch) to evaluate the program. For the demo, I also plan to provide some sample CSV data so visitors can see how the import function works. It imports the transactions into the ledger, and so the transactions need to be matched with another account and entered into the ledger (that's what the "Matching" button is for). It is kind of backwards, but with so much CSV data available from online banking its too useful to pass up. Conversely, I'd like to make it more obvious so that once a person creates a journal entry, they can use the "+" link to automatically post the individual transactions to the general ledger. These features are still pretty basic, but I want to make sure that the core concept is as clear as possible throughout the application before getting to the more complicated stuff. Hopefully this will help users get acclimated to the software and encourage them to use it and contribute to it.