I love seeing open source business administration software. I go thru it and learn business administration concepts. I wonder if there is any other resource for exposing these things.
Meh, this feels more like marketing than open source. The "free" on premise hosted version is limited. Also, no mention of "apps", like inventory, stripe, PoS, etc. for the self hosted version.
Edit: it seems the on-premise version supports apps: There is no app included in any plan. All apps must be purchased separately from the App Store.
As far as I can tell that is the way things are going. A number of countries, eg Denmark, is implementing legislation that basically requires this - by requiring backup, standard accounting model for compliance check, electronic invoices, online vat etc.
It's interesting that it will "automatically" switch to GPLv3 in 4 years (as specified in the license).
Would be nice if more closed source software were released with such a license.
Edit: the production Use Grant are atrocious :
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided you do not use it in any of the following ways:
(1) Use the Licensed Work with a total of more than two users or one company or one thousand invoices.
> It's interesting that it will "automatically" switch to GPLv3 in 4 years (as specified in the license).
> Would be nice if more closed source software were released with such a license.
And it would be nice if there was a better term than "source available" to describe licenses such as BSL and SSPL, and ideally to differentiate usage grants. GitHub project under BSL with the above very constraining usage grant vs GitLab project BSL with "do whatever you want just don't host to sell to others" vs code with no license thrown on a .zip on an FTP are all "source available".
The license basically seems to be a "demo" license, considering the limit of 1,000 invoices or 2 users. Not a bad idea, really. Imagine a world where every company released their source code like this! Things would be very different.
It's not really "free" but is also very much "open source," as the source is completely available.
It's interesting that their site explicitly states it as open source.
I think the problem is that they don't understand the term. Open source is a legal term, with many side meanings, while they seem to be referring only to the fact that the source code is published and therefore is in the open.
Oh, no, not at all... For anything but the most trivial of uses, it's paid now. The title says "free, open-source online accounting software for small businesses", but it's more like "free xor online" and source-available, not open source.
I doubt that will appease the haters. I still think it's funny that we've somehow birthed a whole generation of young developers who will talk shit about the tried-and-true technologies that practically everything runs on, and then go back to reinventing every possible wheel they can find in checks notes Javascript.
People have been hating on this or that language. In particular PHP for the better part of 15/20 years now. It’s just human nature and tribalism at this point I guess. There’s the potential to create insecure code in any language, it just happened most often in PHP because of how accessible and cheap it was for the masses with shared hosting is all.
It also didn't help that a wildly inaccurate blog post was spread around (PHP: A fractal of bad design) and people took it as gospel, and still do to this day even though its a totally different language these days.
PHP pays the bills and these days has fewer novices writing utter junk, that's a plus in my book!
The easiest way to silence someone who's die-hard over the top in love with Javascript is ask them to compile something they wrote 3 years ago from scratch without a copy of the node_modules directory from its original compilation.
Then you get to watch the mountain of errors and ridiculous amount of time wasted.
I thought Frappe Books was an official Frappe project. But it looks like community maintainers took over for a while and the project is again looking for new maintainers?
We're working on an MIT-licensed ERP built on Supabase/Remix. Currently ERPNext is much better (because it's more flushed out). But not for long I hope :)
Interesting choice of a TLD. At first I thought it was free (like eu.org) but it seems that it's around $15, so pretty much like other domains. Is there a particular reason you went with .us.org?
Yeah, I like it -- but our team unanimously think it's stupid haha. So we'll be moving over to this domain soon: https://docs.crbnerp.com -- It's tough to get a good domain.
We'll focus on discrete manufacturing. Part of the team has experience in machining, so it's likely that we'll focus on that first. But my experience is in more complex configure-to-order type stuff.
> Akaunting is free, open-source online accounting software for small businesses
So my obvious questions are 1. if it's free, how do they make money / maintain it, and 2. if it's online, how is it kept secure. So...
> That's right, completely free. The Standard plan of the On-Premise (self-hosted) version is free in terms of price and freedom (source code available).
If by "completely free" you mean "with a lot of restrictions, starting with self-hosting" and by "freedom" you don't mean the same thing everyone else means by that (since as everyone else pointed out this is not open source).
Okay, fine, by "free, open-open source online accounting software" they mean "free or online but not both, and source-available". That's more lies than I would want from accounting software, but let's see if they're secure.
From the front page:
> As we talk about your financials, you must be sure that data is in safe and software doesn't abuse them. Open Source software provides you full privacy.
Again, not open source, but source-available does mean auditable. Of course, it doesn't mean privacy-respecting (even real FOSS can expose your data, you can just see that it does and patch it), and it helps but it certainly doesn't automatically mean secure.
> Completely safe. Our servers are protected physically and electronically. Any connection between you and Akaunting Cloud is protected by 256-bit SSL encryption, and backups are taken hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.
So, uh. I cannot stress enough how much that would not reassure me. No mention of at-rest encryption, no audits, no reason to think they aren't hosting the thing on servers that never get security patches. "We use HTTPS and take backups" is something but it's the bare minimum for any paid SaaS, not something to brag about and nowhere near good enough for something with all your financial information.
I looked into Akaunting a few months ago. Pulling and running the latest docker image immediately resulted in an error. Going to the forums, there was a thread with many complaining about the issue. No response from the devs for weeks. Would recommend looking elsewhere.
I looked at Akaunting, but the licensing was not appealing. I've used Invoice Ninja (https://www.invoiceninja.org/) for over a year now. I pay for the white label and have had minimal issues.
Ledger seems too tedious to me for some reason. Tabbing through a form view like GnuCash was a lot easier/faster than ledger's CLI. Editing the text files isn't great either, the text formatting is white space heavy and meant to be readable (but not very writable). Would've been nice to have it as YAML or Jsonnet maybe.
I just tried to create a company named 'Test Company' and got validation error. I changed to 'Real Company' and got through validation. That's just silly logic. What other special validation will trip me up? What if my company name is really 'Test Company'?
81 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadEdit: it seems the on-premise version supports apps: There is no app included in any plan. All apps must be purchased separately from the App Store.
It isn't free as in software, as both FSF and OSI requires software compatible with their goals to have no limitations on use.
on premise is the exception
I think the traditional standalone accounting software will be a thing of the past here after the implementation of the new accounting law.
Also cloud based accounting systems are probably easier to make money on.
[1] https://github.com/akaunting/akaunting/blob/master/LICENSE.t...
It's interesting that it will "automatically" switch to GPLv3 in 4 years (as specified in the license).
Would be nice if more closed source software were released with such a license.
Edit: the production Use Grant are atrocious :
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided you do not use it in any of the following ways: (1) Use the Licensed Work with a total of more than two users or one company or one thousand invoices.
If you have more than two users you cannot use it in production.
SO it only useful if you have exactly two users.
The SSPL seems far close to being open than the BSL.
> It's interesting that it will "automatically" switch to GPLv3 in 4 years (as specified in the license).
> Would be nice if more closed source software were released with such a license.
And it would be nice if there was a better term than "source available" to describe licenses such as BSL and SSPL, and ideally to differentiate usage grants. GitHub project under BSL with the above very constraining usage grant vs GitLab project BSL with "do whatever you want just don't host to sell to others" vs code with no license thrown on a .zip on an FTP are all "source available".
Unlike open source licenses, the BSL prohibits the licensed code from being used in production — without explicit approval from the licensor.
Especially the (1) of the originally linked licence will make it pretty much unusable beyond the smallest deployments (limited to <1k invoices)
It's not really "free" but is also very much "open source," as the source is completely available.
I think the problem is that they don't understand the term. Open source is a legal term, with many side meanings, while they seem to be referring only to the fact that the source code is published and therefore is in the open.
Written in PHP.
and to save you few click, it uses PHP as the underlying platform and language
PHP pays the bills and these days has fewer novices writing utter junk, that's a plus in my book!
Then you get to watch the mountain of errors and ridiculous amount of time wasted.
Ledger - https://ledger-cli.org/
https://erpnext.com/
https://ofbiz.apache.org
https://erpnext.com/license-trademark
https://github.com/barbinbrad/carbon
Interesting choice of a TLD. At first I thought it was free (like eu.org) but it seems that it's around $15, so pretty much like other domains. Is there a particular reason you went with .us.org?
What kind of manufacturing do you plan to support? And what does it mean to be specific about support for American manufacturing?
Github link on https://erpnext.com/ goes to https://github.com/erpnext which is pointless.
Actual repo seems to be https://github.com/frappe/erpnext and is GPL-3.0.
I run a manually installed, locally hosted instance. It's not much of a hassle.
Terrible name but pretty solid product.
So my obvious questions are 1. if it's free, how do they make money / maintain it, and 2. if it's online, how is it kept secure. So...
> That's right, completely free. The Standard plan of the On-Premise (self-hosted) version is free in terms of price and freedom (source code available).
If by "completely free" you mean "with a lot of restrictions, starting with self-hosting" and by "freedom" you don't mean the same thing everyone else means by that (since as everyone else pointed out this is not open source).
Okay, fine, by "free, open-open source online accounting software" they mean "free or online but not both, and source-available". That's more lies than I would want from accounting software, but let's see if they're secure.
From the front page:
> As we talk about your financials, you must be sure that data is in safe and software doesn't abuse them. Open Source software provides you full privacy.
Again, not open source, but source-available does mean auditable. Of course, it doesn't mean privacy-respecting (even real FOSS can expose your data, you can just see that it does and patch it), and it helps but it certainly doesn't automatically mean secure.
Then on https://akaunting.com/plans :
> Is my data safe?
> Completely safe. Our servers are protected physically and electronically. Any connection between you and Akaunting Cloud is protected by 256-bit SSL encryption, and backups are taken hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.
So, uh. I cannot stress enough how much that would not reassure me. No mention of at-rest encryption, no audits, no reason to think they aren't hosting the thing on servers that never get security patches. "We use HTTPS and take backups" is something but it's the bare minimum for any paid SaaS, not something to brag about and nowhere near good enough for something with all your financial information.
"We are secure because we use HTTPS, not HTTP" is rather 1994 more than 2024.
(Although it's worth noting that that's not the biggest limitation either, just the one that stuck out to me when I wrote the comment)
Someone should just write a ledger-cli graphical view with the text file as still the primary way to input new data.
Really all I want is an 80s TUI accounting app that "just works" as ledger does but with a menu driven interface with keyboard shortcut support.
Modern stuff like multi-user capabilities, plugins, templates, API etc. wouldn't hurt.
How do I receive a payment against an invoice?