It’s that time of year to start thinking about sorting the accounts out properly. The shoe box full of receipts gets emptied on the kitchen table and a close scrutiny of calendars, diaries, emails is undertaken to establish movements, costs and expenses.

Having sat up half the night with the Linux cookbook (it is fascinating and I can make my computer do all sorts of interesting things, although what the point of some of it is lost on me due to my general lack of understanding), I decided to try and get my head around GnuCash .

Free, open source software with good support on the web.

It occurs to me while I’m crunching in all the figures, x amount at the Coop, y amount for train fares, that I trust the open source solution more than a proprietary one. That this is so, is in itself subversive of the huge amounts of money which commercial software companies spend on marketing and advertising. Much of this is surely to convince the consumer that their software is ‘guaranteed’ to function in a certain way, and in implicit in this is the notion of trust. ‘Buy this, it will work’.

The fact that the open source solution is better regarded by large numbers of people says as much about human behaviour and the search for alternatives as it does about software itself.

Must go away and re-read George Lukac’s History and Class Consciousness…I’ve a feeling there is something in there about social totalities and their alternatives..