[Ilugc] Re: avsap and indian financial accounting software
- From: lawgon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Kenneth Gonsalves)
- Date: Sat Jun 17 10:43:56 2006
i am cc-ing the lug on this as i feel it is an important topic
On 15-Jun-06, at 5:02 AM, Raja Subramanian wrote:
Hi,
I attended the May (or was it April?) ILUGC meeting and was very
intrigued by
your arguments that India needs open sourced applications
specifically created
for the local environment. I had a look through avsap recently.
my thesis is very simple:
1. By far the most succesful open source model has been the 'sell it,
free it' model. This means that an application has been built for a
specific customer and tested in practice and then opensourced. Very
few successful open source applications are the 'scratch the itch'
type where the developer feels something is needed (or he wants to do
it). The important examples are koha and sql-ledger. (Although not
succesful, avsap falls in this category as it was originally written
for a wholesale merchant in the local bazaar and was in production
for two years before it was released.)
2. In any field, there should be many competing applications
available, as it is only in a competitive environment that a
succesful application can be developed
3. There is huge demand for customised applications in india - some
examples, online bus booking, supermarket billing, hotel booking and
billing etc etc. Take a look at the crappy stuff KPN travels has
purchased - couldnt we do better?
4. This demand is being serviced mostly by customised applications -
the indian market is not very keen on readymade packages. Example is
nestle, which gives its distributors a package that drives them
crazy. (I had adapted avsap to mesh into amul's whole sale system)
5. So if you want to make a successful opensource application in
India for any purpose, first find a customer, get him to pay you,
build it to his satisfaction and then maybe generalise it and release
it under an opensource license
I would like to understand the FOSS accounting packages situation a
bit
better. Thank you for taking a few moments to go through this:
I'm not an accountant by any means, and I don't understand how Indian
accounting is different from that in any other country. And why
are the
hundreds of financial accounting packages available on
freshmeat.net or sf.net
unsuitable for Indian consumption? What makes Tally so special or
different?
A large percentage of Indian firms etc want to manipulate accounts -
tally is excellent for this purpose - no other FA package caters to
this need
Is it feasible to identify an existing FOSS accounts package and
customize it
for Indian practices?
This is scratching an itch. Do you have a customer? if you do, you
will find it easier to write an app from scratch than to customise an
existing package. We think and do business differently from people in
the west. (This is not chauvinism, it is my experience at the grass
roots)
--
regards
kg
http://lawgon.livejournal.com
http://avsap.org.in
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