What started off as a quest to evaluate FOSS money management apps ended up revealing an issue with PayPal that plagues even highly funded proprietary money management programs running on that other operating system.
This is both a review and a complaint, which often seems to go hand in hand in the tech world.
I’ve been looking for a financial management app recently. Since I closed a bricks and mortar store back in 2012 — after eight years it became yet another victim of the 2007 recession — I’ve been letting my business and personal bank accounts, along with my PayPal account, sort themselves out separately. Business has improved a bit recently, and the time has come to once again put all of my accounting eggs in the same basket, so to speak.
My plan was supposed to be easy, but you know what they say about well laid plans.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
This isn’t the first time they’ve done this. Last year they handed out $125,000 to five projects — meaning that this year they’ve nearly doubled down on their bet. Last year’s donations included money going to the Electronic Frontier Foundations Privacy Badger — a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other trackers from following users — and Girl Develop It for its Open Source Mentorship program.
In a nutshell, the Mozilla Foundation finds that continuing to maintain and development Thunderbird distracts from its current focus of getting Firefox back on track. Thunderbird is a huge project, requiring much in the way of resources, but has a user base that’s been in decline since 2012, as many users are turning away from desktop email clients in favor of web based email services.