einhverfr's Journal: LedgerSMB 1.2 released, SQL-Ledger changes licenses

SQL-Ledger changed its license away from the GPL to a license that many of us feel meets neither the FSF's definition of Free Software nor the OSI's definition of Open Source. Perhaps the reason is that DWS is afraid of the competition.

It seems that the real reason is the growth of the LedgerSMB project which forked from that software about six months ago. SQL-Ledger's new license appears to be specifically aimed at targetting forks with the insistance that the software cannot be rebranded.

However, if this is the reason, it is a moot point at this point. LedgerSMB has already been gaining publicity as being far more security-minded than SQL-Ledger, and a study of the security information at Secunia and other sites confirms this. Indeed, LedgerSMB 1.2 was largely delayed due to a desire to audit and correct as many SQL injection issues as could be found (and we found a lot).

That is not to say that 1.2 is just a security release. We also added a framework for credit card processing (card present or card not present), better POS support, support for Slony replication, and a number of other enhancements. In fact our changelog for 1.2.0 is several pages long.

LedgerSMB 1.2 is the third major release in six months, and it is the last release to focus on stabilizing/securing the existing SQL-Ledger codebase. Our work now is to build a completely new and better architecture for the application so that it can continue to grow sustainably. The new architecture will be based on MVC principals, but will be much more database-centric, allowing for add-ons to better share access to the application data model (in fact the data model will almost entirely be encapsulated in the database).

In particular, we expect to add the following features in 1.3:

• Database-level security
• Contact management normalization
• RESTful web services
• Voucher system
• Two-phase posting for accounting process control
• Integration with online banking
• Custom reporting infrastructure