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 10 September 2007 - Its Official, its a love-hate relationship with Microsoft Windows. Philip Copeman, Project Leader of TurboCASH Accounting explains why the future of TurboCASH is bound to Windows and why that is a Real problem for Open Source.
In the eyes of the public, many people see the Open Source movement as synonymous with Linux. But this is far from reality. The Open Source movement has a very strong grounding in the Windows Operating System. Many of the top Sourceforge projects are Windows only projects. One of our partners - www.opensourcewindows.org is a leading resource for Open Source software and many of you have linked to www.turbocash.net through this site.
85% of visitors to www.turbocash.net are Windows users. Any attempts to get Linux based Open Source Accounting packages have failed and projects either ceased, closed their doors to converted their packages to Windows.
So this should be easy for us. We are in the Accounting business right? What do we care about Operating Systems? We should continue on the path of simply providing the best solution for our users on the platform of their choice. If they are prepared to pay Microsoft for Windows, then why should we worry?
Here's the rub
Open Source "Free" is about Liberty not Charity. Its not about the cost of the software, its about the process that gives us the products. Anyone that knows and uses OS products, like TurboCASH or Open Offices, Firefox, Thunderbird AND Linux will tell you that not only are they free, more importantly they are BETTER. The reason that they are better is that each product can be downloaded in source form, debugged, refactored and reconstituted again by hundreds of participants. By upstreaming and downstreaming to other projects, this turns into the contributions of thousands of participants (Programmers, accountants, integrators, translators)
Two big blockages pervert this process in TurboCASH, namely Windows and Delphi. Windows is the Operating System and Delphi is the implementation of Pascal that we use to develop TurboCASH. They are both proprietory systems. The problems with these systems is that they are closed. For example a translator can't go in a "change" an error message or dialogue box. We are restricted to using the bespoke offering by Microsoft or Borland. This means that the choice of the software is not ours, its becomes the choice of a marketing executive sitting behind a desk somewhere in Seattle or California. That marketing executive does not have product perfection foremost on his mind. Revenue generation is foremost on his mind.
This leaves us with a conundrum. With our users on Windows and Delphi historically entrenched in our project, we can only gaze over the fence at the Freedom of the Linux market. Until we get a major support both in the number of users and in development financially we can only follow our Windows strategy and offer watered down WINE solutions to Linux.
Software development, like life is a set of compromises and if it means living with the beast or sleeping with the enemy - so be it.
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