GPL stands for the Gnu General Public Licence. This differs from
most software licence agreements in several dramatic ways. Be sure
to read the software licence included with
this software.
For one, the GPL licence spends more time GIVING you rights where a
normal software licence spends time TAKING your rights away.
GPL licenced software specifically MUST be free. Any and all
iterations and derivitive works built on GPL software must remain
free. This does not mean you cannot charge a small fee for media
it is supplied on, or services provided alongside the software (such as
consulting.)
GPL licenced software also requires that source code be
available. This makes any GPL licensed software naturally also
"OSS" or "Open Source Software" as the media is so fond of mentioning
lately.
Why would you use GPL software instead of commercial products?
For one, many people have access to the source code, meaning that if a
user downloads the software and wants to improve on it, add a feature,
fix a bug, etc... he can! But, that doesn't help the average joe
computer user with no programming experience... or does it? If
there are thousands of programmers who could potentially be fixing bugs
and security flaws in a particular software, everyone benefits!
Another reason would be cost. Zero. Nada.
Nuthin'. You didn't spend $40 for this software (and if you did,
someone violated the terms of the license agreement.) Some people
would lead you to believe you will spend more money trying to make GPL
software work than if you had just bought a commercial product to begin
with. While in some cases this might be true, I've gone to great
lengths to make sure it's NOT the case with CheckBook Tracker.
Another would be upgradability. You aren't relying on one
software vendor, who might go out of business, to continue to maintain
the software.
Why did I specifically choose to make this free software? Because
I believe in contributing back. I'm using Mandrake Linux right
now, and I downloaded it for free from Mandrake's website. I'm
writing this with Mozilla, which is free. I check my e-mail, run a
webserver, run a mail server (that does a darn good job filtering out
spam thank you!) and do my programming, all using FREE software.
When I wanted to leave Windows behind for full-time Linux use, there
was something missing. Personal finance software in Linux was
either hard to install, hard to compile, hard to use, or all of the
above. I was hooked on using easy to use personal finance sofware
in Windows and couldn't find any FREE software for Linux that was
similar to what I wanted. Oh sure, there's a couple of commercial
products for Linux to do that, but nothing that was open-source or GPL
licenced.
So when I came across the Lazarus programming environment (http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org)
which is a FREE (GPL) replacement for Kylix or Delphi Pascal object
oriented programming, I decided to write my own. I'm a longtime
Delphi addict and Lazarus was a perfect match.