If you’ve been keeping an eye on PBooks, you’ll have noticed several minor releases lately. These releases are in preparation of making PBooks more stable. Although a public stable release is a long ways away, developers may try to use the software in a productive manner before then.
I, for one, am actually using PBooks on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, I need to keep the versions clean and distinct, and the upgrade path simple. To do so, I’ve implemented versioning for both the database and the code base, and have setup a minimal testing process to go through before each milestone is complete.
Working with trac has been a terrific learning experience, and although I plan to keep releasing early and often, the releases will be more granular in the features, functions, and fixes they represent.
Thanks as always for your interest!
Looks good as a possible replacement of QB. I’ve looked at a lot of other packages - lots of overweight ERPs, but this looks interesting.
I saw that invoices didn’t work on the demo? perhaps someone screwed up the config?
Hi Karl, Thanks for checking this out. You are right about the invoices not working in the demo, for invoices to work there needs to be an account selected as the accounts receivable account, but I haven’t decided on the best way to do that yet. Its hacked into one of the runtime scripts at the moment, but needs to be user configurable but not easily breakable.
How many people working on this (1?) .. What state are you located?
Can you put up something that says pbooks will ALWAYS be gpl?
I wrote a shipping module for OSC and customized things a bit . I was looking at webERP - even wrote a US_en po file for it - the user interface just isn’t good enough.
At the bottom of http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/Weberp I have some schema stuff I was thinking about.
You need to get this into Debian ASAP - - you will get some help that way - if you are ready for it.
I think you are using mySQL - there could be some problems - not really ACID need to set up any money accounts to use innodb.
Hi Karl, thanks again for your interest. Yep - one person working on it at the moment - me!
Though I have my cousin Max doing the testing on it here and there. We’re in Massachusetts. There is another company in Alabama which has expressed interest in assigning a developer to the project, but I’m not sure when that will happen.
Sure, I can put something up that will say this will always be GPL. Are you thinking of how the SQL Ledger project changed license on the sly? Not cool in my opinion.
As you noticed, PBooks is simple - I’m working very hard to keep the core as simple as possible. That way, it will just do the basics very well, there are way too many open source accounting programs which had to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Maybe PBooks can help avoid that in the future.
I’m no lawyer but I think GPL software will always be GPL. And if the license is changed, the original source can be forked. Also, since this project is web-based, its license under the Affero GPL, which is a little more restrictive than the regular GPL, in an attempt to close the SaaS loophole.
I do use MySQL with innodb, the database model uses foreign keys to maintain relationships, and it can use metabase or MDB2 as a database abstraction layer, and a PDO interface is in the works, so Postgres, SQLite, or SQLServer should work OK too.
I’m totally looking to get this into debian!
http://www.docunext.com/2007/10/21/contributing-packages-to-debian/
http://www.docunext.com/2007/10/19/no-php5-readline-in-debian/
Soon.