From TurboCASH Wiki

After the end of the Y2K boom, when the Dot Com bubble had burst and the Internet Winter had set in, Philip Copeman found himself owner of a lame duck Software company. Using his own money he built a new version of TurboCASH Accounting and released it under the Open Source licence. Today TurboCASH is one of the hottest downloads on the Internet,

Pictures Philip and David
Philip Swings
bowler hat
TurboCASH Logos

Contents 1 An interview with Philip Copeman 1.1 How did you get into the Open Source business? 1.2 How do you make money out of an Open Source Project? 1.3 OK so if you are a one man business and have no revenue to speak of just what does TurboCASH have to offer the users? 1.4 You have a strategy of one product for every market. Surely this is not possible? Every country has different tax laws. Surely you end up with a spaghetti program? 1.5 What kind of people join an Open Source project? 1.6 You make a lot of mention of how you are helped by the Sourceforge Community, what do you mean? 2 Microsoft and Windows Competitors 2.1 TurboCASH is developed in Windows and Delphi, surely that is a paradox for an Open Source project? 2.2 The Open Source products are charged with having 'No Support', surely this make a mission-critical application like Accounting not suitable to Open Source? 2.3 If TurboCASH is so great, how come 9 out of 10 Accountants recommend Pastel Accounting? 2.4 Microsoft has made announcements about its entry into the Accounting market, how will this affect the Accounting Market? 2.5 You have some fairly radical views on copyright? Did you always have these? 2.6 How do you deal with main stream copyright owners like Microsoft? 3 Linux 3.1 You have no Linux version of TurboCASH, there seems little acitvity on your web site. What's going on? 3.2 Have you had any luck with finding Linux developers as yet for the project? What type of people are you looking for? 3.3 Why have you decided to go with Linux? 3.4 What about the other Linux-based accounting packages available at the moment, and how does Turbocash fit into that 'market'? 4 The Future 4.1 Come on it can't all be perfect, what are the downsides of the Open Source model? 4.2 Where to now for TurboCASH?

An interview with Philip Copeman

How did you get into the Open Source business?

We came to Open Source from a different angle to most. A few years ago we found ourselves in a corner, stuck in the South of Africa, in a sideline market, competing against three international competitors, including some of the most vicious people in the software business. We were going nowhere. I was drawn to open source by the components that we were using in our development. I found that free and open source components were actually better than the ones that we had to pay hundreds of dollars for. This lead me to reading and following the Open Source principles. It was a marketing decision for us. We were right, the Open Source brand has brought us international recognition.

After months of agonizing we jumped in and nearly went out of business. The first people to make the downloads were the ones that had been paying us. It took a while for the word to get out there that we were not just some failed technology dumped for free. TurboCASH has been completely rewritten. We are serious about taking a share of the Accounting market.

How do you make money out of an Open Source Project?

I am always amused by that question. Everyone involved with TurboCASH is in it for the money. This is not Bible Software or Education Software for underprivileged children, this is Bookkeeping! Think of it like a Sardine Run. These fish gather together in a frenzy every year. Everyone that is involved, is involved for their own benefit. Sardines join because they get protection by the number of fish, dolphins and predators join because they feed off them and trawlers catch the predator fish. Everyone benefits and follows the run.

The unusual fact about an Open Source project is that it is self sustaining. Very few of them fail. They don't go insolvent as they have no debts and they can always pay their expenses, because they don't have any. True, some of them don't get off the ground and it is really expensive to launch a good one, but once they are up they are up. The project itself pulls the sustaining resources.

Thousands of people download every month and hundreds of people live off supporting this base of users, but I am a one man business. My role is to coordinate the project and to arrange upstreaming and downstreaming relationships. This makes it easy to support myself. My challenge is to create the revenue opportunities for others to share in this.

Our users can get paid support from any number of local consultants, but it is a voluntary expense and they are not limited to getting it from one company. There is little change to us in the cost of deploying 10 or 100 copies of TurboCASH. Our architecture and our distributed community is our key advantage.

OK so if you are a one man business and have no revenue to speak of just what does TurboCASH have to offer the users?

Its not true that we have NO revenue. I focus on CD production, that is, providing CDs and training movies to users that can't make huge Internet downloads We have a good business providing CDs, manuals, training courses and support to users. So while the software is free there is always a good business implementing it.

Its also not true that I am a ONE man business. Our project members run into hundreds. They do anything from core development to implementations. They are the true heart of the project. Without them we would be nothing. Yet they themselves are usually small companies or also one man bands. This is the fabric of Open Source, volunteers, self motivated people helping themselves and yet helping the community. It is going to be hard to beat us.

Our Free structure is our greatest advantage. Our competitors are all public companies with demanding shareholders. The competitors are trapped inside their own assets. They all live off the annuity model of charging their users very high licencing fees. I calculated that on average a small business network user gives over 200 UK Pounds to the Sage shareholders every year, before they even start developing or supporting the software. So to deliver a package equivalent to TurboCASH costs them 1000 UK Pounds per year. They are unable to shift this strategy without severely hampering their profitability. This makes them unable to respond to the threat of Open Source. There are no major players capable of adopting our “Free” strategy. For the foreseeable future this gives us a significant advantage.

The free nature of the program makes us super responsive. We have two releases in a week, freely downloadable. The commercial competitors are so bothered about serial numbers and licencing periods, that their products are released once a year. It is not long before the consumer starts to discover that not only is TurboCASH cheaper, it is also better. The commercial vendors' only protection is that it is hard to "change" systems. But these walls crumble.

Our commercial competitors have expensive centralised support call centres. They use this as a selling tool, claiming that support is a crucial service that they provide. The truth is that they create that need for support. If you get it right in the program, the need for support declines. Also if you have open communications, your channel can carry that support. Our architecture and our distributed community is our key advantage.

You have a strategy of one product for every market. Surely this is not possible? Every country has different tax laws. Surely you end up with a spaghetti program?

We have the advantage that TurboCASH comes originally from South Africa. This is a country with 11 Official Languages! From our beginnings we have always prepared a program that can be translated by the user on the fly. In particular we always developed in English and Afrikaans. This is one of the reasons that TurboCASH has moved rapidly into Dutch derivative countries like Holland, Belgium and Indonesia.

It is not only for language but also terminology that this is very useful. For example the same concept of “VAT” for a British person is “GST” for an Australian or “TAX” for an American. Without recompiling the program a non technical person can change :Debtor” to “Patient” or “Member”. TurboCASH can quickly and easily morph into another form. All this without any programming.! The result of this is that One program can be deployed in many markets. We do not have to keep separate versions of the software. We only maintain one package. This is in complete contrast to our competitors. Quickbooks has multiple versions of its programs. Features available in one version are not available in another. SAGE does not even bother to try this. They have different products in every country that they are in.

The core of the package follows the British VAT system. These guys are the masters of tax collection. They invented income tax and founded the Empire on it. This immediately gives us all the old dominions including South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore. Europe is a variation of the UK VAT and we have already made this change. Canada has a double taxation and the US is actually a simplified version of VAT. We are already running in South America without any change. So I am not sure what all the fuss is about?

Our core focus for TurboCASH is a General Ledger. In this respect all businesses from Panama to Pietermaritzburg are the same. Our Plugin technology lets developers customise the program to work for Dutch Banking or OS Commerce shops in the US.

What kind of people join an Open Source project?

The Cathedral and the Bazaar tells us that an Open Source project is going to attract thousands of programmers each adding bricks to the code structure. Many people join the TurboCASH project, but it is a surprising profile. Rather than young "whizzkids", often the project participants are older, sometimes retired individuals. This is great because we are getting skills such as project management and quality control coming from people that have worked on large corporate projects. Hundreds of emails and postings to our forums every day help to give us the feedback we need. So there are large roles for non programmers - accountants and consultants make up the majority of our project members. Its not the rocket science, but the patient nit picking by our project members that is making TurboCASH what it is today. In particular TurboCASH is being moulded into a package that works in hundreds of different markets.

You make a lot of mention of how you are helped by the Sourceforge Community, what do you mean?

Sourceforge is the biggest Open Source web site in the world. They have over 10 000 projects and over 1 Million members. They also have sophisticated project management and CVS software that is critical for us to run the TurboCASH project. They also have relationships with bandwidth mirrors that provide us over 700 Gb of downloads a month. These can sometimes be over 800 in a day! If we tried this from South Africa it would cost us R 100 K per month. They do all of this for us free.

We are very proud of the fact that we are in the top 1% of their projects. We are now knocking on the door of their top 100 projects. Without their service our international expansion would never have happened.

Microsoft and Windows Competitors

TurboCASH is developed in Windows and Delphi, surely that is a paradox for an Open Source project?

In an ideal world we would like to have an Open Source operating system with an Open Source development environment. However we have to face the fact that right now Windows brings us 98% of the market and Delphi is simply the best way to connect a client side app to a database. It would be great to see Linux and Lazarus succeed, even better would be to see Borland and Microsoft Open Source their products. We will be the first to adopt the Open Source products the moment we can. Borland has been getting canned on market share and there are now desktop versions of Linux coming by the dozen. Neither of them shows any intention of moving to Open source.

So where does that leave me – a Windows fan stuck with a supplier who doesn't understand me and who is hellbent on following their short term profit? The situation is actually worse than that. Borland seems determined to follow Microsoft into the .NET graveyard. The surprising answer is that we have to commit hard to the Windows standard and develop tight Windows code.

Our solution is to write Windows programs and write the best Windows programs that we can. We choose Open Source components first, but where that is not possible, we compromise and use commercial components, because being pure Open Source is not as important to us as giving our users a great program. Open Source purists hate this approach. They argue that for a program to be free the compiler and the operating system must be free. But how far does this go? Are we going to go after Intel and say that we won't run on a processor unless its instruction set is Open Source.

The Open Source products are charged with having 'No Support', surely this make a mission-critical application like Accounting not suitable to Open Source?

You are always free to engage the services of a paid consultant, there are hundreds available on our web site. However, many first time visitors to the TurboCASH project do find it frustrating that there is no one who jumps up to "help" you the moment they come to the web site. They have simple questions to ask like, "Will TurboCASH work for me? Can I extend it to meet my problems? Will there be help for me if I get stuck?"

All they hit is a web site that offers to let you download the software, read the help and pay for someone to address your problems. What happened to the friendly salesperson that is there to assist "customers". If you are used to walking into a company and getting "free" service, your first encounter with an Open Source software project will be frustrating to you. This is even worse if you have just shelled out $50 for a CD and you now need some call centre "Service", all you meet is another opportunity to pay more money!

An Open Source project is very different. It's more like a library or a search engine. You are free to enter whenever you like and free to leave whenever you like. There is no one tracking you or checking that you have not copied the technology or paid your fees. You can walk out of the door with a full copy of the project on your disk - free! Those of us who have been in Open Source for a while know that it is a pointless exercise to try and get members of the project to do things for free. Those that don't know this come in, hang around and leave a bit wiser and the next time they return they are ready to take advantage of the offerings.

If TurboCASH is so great, how come 9 out of 10 Accountants recommend Pastel Accounting?

I am sure it was 8.5 the last time we counted! I would be surprised if it was this high. We get 500 downloads a day on TurboCASH. I simply can't see accountants recommending Pastel to 5000 users every day of the month.

Pastel is a South African thing. We face a different competitor in nearly every market. It is a feature of the Accounting market that these monopolies exist all around the world, in the US it is Quickbooks, in Canada Simply Accounting, in the UK SAGE, in Australia MYOB. The great thing for us is that they all work off a similar model. Only a small percentage of the revenue collected from the users goes into improving their products, the major slice either goes to advertising - telling the users what a good idea it was to buy their product, or to their shareholders telling them what a good idea it was to invest in the company. It can't be long before users get the message that not only is TurboCASH free, but the Open Source process also produces better code.

Our success depends on us getting a small market share accross many markets. So yes, it may be difficult to create churn and we may never convince a core of users to change, but we will certainly take enough share from a whole lot of markets to make TurboCASH the biggest global product. With over 1000 new registrations per month and growing, we are already costing the current encumbents over R 5 Million per month. While we haven't made any market share claims, sooner or later someone is going to notice.

Microsoft has made announcements about its entry into the Accounting market, how will this affect the Accounting Market?

This is going to be great for us. SAGE, Pastel and the others are going to have to take down those "Microsoft preferred partners posters" in their receptions and have a serious rethink about their SQL Server strategies. Microsoft is going to shake-up the market and what is going to come out of it is that you can actually use other accounting products to do your books. When that happens, TurboCASH is going to be waiting there as a free download.

You have some fairly radical views on copyright? Did you always have these?

I was amused to hear a quote from the geneticist Graig Venter talking about DNA and the human genome. He basically said that people always think that intellectual property should be in the public domain until they think that they have a claim on it then they think it should be private. I worked for 20 years selling commercial programs. Up until 3 years ago Open Source did not really exist in the Windows market. I personally never gave a thought to the GNU GPL. But it is strange how you change when you become exposed to it, it really starts you to think in a new way. I really feel the gap widening between those of us in the OS communtiy and those that are not.

We have grown up in the “copyright generation”. We have also grown up in a period of massive technical innovation. Its an easy mistake to attribute the technical advances to the copyright laws. Copyright has also made a few very rich and it has entrenched rigid distribution channels and given them the financial means to manipulate the legal system to protect their asset. When you are paying large amounts of tax to the US Government you have a really strong ally. However lets start by examining other industries, where we can be less emotional.

A musician and her record company take the Bach Cello Suites, record them and then start claiming copyright over the work. They close off a piece of work, take a public trademark and make it their own. They use the Bach name and trademark to promote their personal work. They are effectively privatising a public asset namely that we like the Cello Suites. No one would be interested in listening to her own compositions. The argument is that without this the musician would never be paid for her work. But the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of the sales revenue goes to the record company who spends it promoting their label and fighting for their copyright. The musician simply “works there”. Musicians who don't follow this route get left out in the cold. Yes, this may benefit a few, but the reality is that this system keeps the vast majority of musicians in poverty, who without a record contract find themselves closed to the market. The GPL would say that if she uses the Bach work she is required to put the extensions back into the public domain.

Now the same argument extends to what we term “original Modern music”. Some trumped up pop composer takes a 12 bar blues in F Major, something that is part of our subliminal listening experience, adds a variation to it puts on some mindless lyrics and closes off a public asset. I put it to you that license control over music should be scrapped. All out of copyright works should be classified as GPL. We are not saying you can't make music, make it if you want, but don't get upset if we copy it.

Movies - Take “The War of the Worlds” - here is a science fiction classic. Something that belongs to all of us. What right does Steven Spielberg have to close this off and force us to pay to watch something that is already ours. I am not saying that he can't make it if he wants to, he can, but he can't then expect us not to copy it. Similar arguments to the music industry mean that unless you have a $100M budget and talk in an American accent, you can't make a successful movie. The industry has killed the innovation of allowing others to participate, because they are forcing their blockbuster genre onto us. Make movies if you want to, but don't bother us if we copy them.

OK – you can see where I am going when I come to Microsoft. What right does anyone have to take the day to day intelligence which we as humanity have in how to move a mouse and keyboard and privatise that, by copyrighting a mainstream operating system? Same arguments apply about the research. Less than 10% of revenues is spent on research, the rest is spent telling the users what a great decision they made choosing Windows and policing the right to copy protect.

How do you deal with main stream copyright owners like Microsoft?

There is a feeling currently out there in the OS world that we leave the commercial companies alone and by not participating in Open Source they will strangle themselves. I believe that to be largely true, but an exception to that is Windows. Yes I do believe that ultimately Open Source will win even against Windows and that Microsoft will be forced to face the decision to Open Source Windows or lose everything, but this will take years and much damage will be done before this comes about.

The problem we have with dealing with Microsoft is similar to the problem we have stopping a developer building another house higher up the mountain. Think how beautiful Johannesburg would be today if we had banned building on the Witwatersrand ridge right from the beginning. The developer is not an evil person, he just sees the personal benefit of building a house on the highest level. We as a community want the mountain open for all of us to enjoy. The money the developer makes by building higher means that he has the individual will and the strength to push it through. I know - I live in the highest house up the mountain!

Lets not confuse looking after our own interest with attacking Microsoft. The legal department at Microsoft has a budget bigger than that of many small countries. You can be sure that those guys are not getting $100 000 per year salaries to worry about community issues. As the public we have to use all the legislative means at our disposal to counter this legal resource.

This is not a Bash Microsoft speech, far from it. I like Windows. I just want to see them behave as part of the world community and not as its tollgate. We have long since paid the fees for their intellectual input. We are looking for ways forward, but we cannot expect them to see it our way. People rarely give up privilege willingly. We have to take them on in the legislature. However right now we must deal with Microsoft in whatever way we can, they are after all unwittingly our partners in Open Source.

Linux

You have no Linux version of TurboCASH, there seems little acitvity on your web site. What's going on?

We are great supporters of Linux. They are brothers in the Open Source movement. However we are foremost accounting software developers. The Operating system battle is not our battle. The fact of the matter is that there are still 500 Million Windows machines out there and since neither my recommendation to litigate against Microsoft or for them to Open Source Windows is likely to happen in the short term, we have to deal with reality. This is not a problem unique to our project. We are members of Sourceforge. When I look at the other top 1% of Sourceforge programs they are mostly Windows programs and many of them are also Delphi.

A move to Linux is not simple for us. The problem is that there is still no such thing as decent cross compiling. Programs that run on Linux look absolutely terrible on Windows. Windows users like myself very quickly get used to Windows-specific ways. When I look at cross compiled programs with their ugly grids and strange hard icons they look to me like old DOS Apps or at best Windows98 apps.

You can't even get around this cross compile problem with browser-based products like PHP. We work a lot with these products, but the fact of the matter is that they all look terrible on Windows. Microsoft owns our mindshare. If a program doesn't work the way that the rest of our Windows programs work, we simply feel uncomfortable. This means that when we develop TurboCASH, we optimise it for Windows. We basically have to go back to the beginning again to start a product for Linux. We have had discussions with a number of Linux developers and projects, but have not yet figured out how to raise and risk the $ 2 Million and 2 years that it will take to engineer a Linux system.

To write a decent fat client accounting system, it is going to have to be built from first principles in Linux, taking full advantage of all the Linux features. Only then are we going to get a world beater.

As a financier of this stuff I have a further problem putting resources into Linux. While Linux has say a 5% desktop penetration, in terms of Accountants this drops to near zero. We get a far better return for our reserach dollar investing in improving our Windows software than we do improving our Linux software, that is, we get more users. So actually besides the technical problems we have, we also need a Linux team to co-finance this with us. Linux has to "buy" us away from the Windows market.

This problem is not unique to us, as nobody else seems able to do it either. If you know any Linux programmers and financiers that are willing to go the distance with us, please send them my way.

Have you had any luck with finding Linux developers as yet for the project? What type of people are you looking for?

I have spoken to a number of companies. The complications that I have is that we are looking for a group that is prepared to go the whole way with us. This is not an afternoon's work. If it was simple it would have been done already. What we are looking for is a comapmny that will match us in input.

We are looking for Python or Lazarus programmers. We have not yet decided on the final environement. The Database will most likely be Firebird or MySQL. These decisions will be made in collaboration with whichever partners come on board. So far the best prospects we have come out of the UK market.

Why have you decided to go with Linux?

I wish I could say that we had changed, but our short run strategy is still very much a Windows strategy, we are in the face of SAGE, Intuit and Microsoft (Their products are Pastel, Quickbooks and Excel respectively). We are up against some of the most vicious people in the software business. Our aim here is to get 5% of the world market - 1 Million users. 98% of accountants in the SME market use Windows.

We do however recognise that Linux is growing and will be an important player. Right now the Linux Accounting space is fallow - it is inviting someone to put down R5 Million and take the position. If we can find a Linux Partner we will do it. If we are able to dominate this space and Linux gets say 10% of the Accounting market, we can end up with double our market share. So we estimate that a Million Users would change to a Linux system if they had the choice.

The limitation for us is that our mission is to get users. Right now it is more effective for us to spend our money in the Windows market as the conversion rate is higher. It would take a Linux partner to help us to change direction.

What about the other Linux-based accounting packages available at the moment, and how does Turbocash fit into that 'market'?

There really are no Linux competitors in the SME end of the business. In the Windows Accounting business there are only really 3 players - SAGE, Intuit and TurboCASH (Microsoft on the way). Certainly in Open Source, very few. GNU CASH is the top Linux one on Sourceforge. We currently have a download rate about 10 times bigger than theirs. The are really a cheque book program like Quicken or Microsoft Money.

There is a whole crew of PHP/MySQL thin client products, mostly forks of NOLA. I don't have a great deal of confidence in the thin client model. Accountants want Fat clients with rapid data entry. We are really interested in PHP as a glue for add ons, but right now as a core development tool, it doesn't cut the mustard.

I saw a product from Canada, Quazar, but they seem a bit confused about the GNU GPL. They are trying the MySQL, Dual licence strategy. I have to believe that this may have been possible 5 years ago, but no longer so. Unless a product follows pure GPL there is no future for it.

I have to say that the stark truth is there are NO serious players in the Linux market. So if you know of anyone that wants to join us send them my way.

The Future

Come on it can't all be perfect, what are the downsides of the Open Source model?

I miss the ads and the salesmen. In a commercial project, much of the revenue is spent on marketing and sales. This gives you an input from a completely different type of person. Open Source projects tend to get dominated by techie types. I know we think we are the most important people in the company, but when the marketing and sales guys are missing, you feel it.

When we had a commercial product, we would sponsor sports teams and take out fancy ads in the media. We simply don't have the cash for it anymore. We have an incredible message, "Come over here and download amazing software", but we don't have the voice to scream it out. It really irks me to drive along the highway and see the competitors' ads. Our marketing is restricted to Google and the word of mouth of our community. We are woking on ways to change that model.

Salesmen are those guys in the dark suits (Usually designer labels) that drive around to your company in a Merc or BMW, they buy you lunch, take you to their company boxes at the local stadium and then discuss your system requirements. They do this because they know that down the line they will take you for the thousands that let you continue to pay for their suits. Call centre operators are Salesmen that have not yet cracked the big time. It is a fact of commercial software houses that less than 10% of the revenue generated goes back to research and development. The rest of the money is spent on those lunches, the salesmen's bonuses and the ads that tell you what a great decision you made to buy their program. The hundreds of Millionaires made at Microsoft and Apple were not developers, they were salesmen!

We don't have any sales people in Open Source projects, and we are poorer for it. It gives us problems all the way down the channel. It is a fact of the commercial programs that they sell for $1500 per year. This doesn't go well in retail so they sell crippled versions through the retail chains, no bank accounts, or single user, or whatever other plan they can use to reduce the product to a barely functional unit. They retail these systems from anywhere from $150 to $500. Now we present our superior copy of TurboCASH with no restrictions for $15, and we can't get the salesman's attention. He would rather make himself a profit than sell his customer a great deal.

Where to now for TurboCASH?

These are exciting times for us. We have got "over the hump". We have nearly 30 000 users and we are growing faster than ever. It is our aim to make TurboCASH as universal as possible. TurboCASH must be something that makes the user money. Therefore we must connect to as many institutions as possible. We must help you to sell and process your orders. Also we know that users hate doing accounting. TurboCASH must gather transactions from as many places as possible, banks, websites, suppliers. We will take the data entry away as much as possible and automate it. We are doing this by linking TurboCASH to Search engines, shopping sites, banks, freight companies and more.