Phil and Brad had a business problem: After over a decade with a product successfull enough to keep them in business, they still hadn't made that leap out of Saskatchewan and into the mainstream ...

"We wanted to see Quasar used all over the world and have the pride of it being our product," Pepers says. "But we needed to figure out a way to do it and still make a living."

First they tried a low, low price for their point-of-sale/SME accounting pack, then they tried giving away the core engine for free hoping to drive sales in the accessory full-feature modules ...

They've settled on rewrite to remove any lingering proprietary bits, and going with a pure GPL, and watching their creation blossom:

Developer input on the Quasar mailing lists has provided valuable information to help Linux Canada with important details, such as streamlining the installation process and improving the international customization (l18N) aspects of Quasar. For example, "a user in Norway has sent an example import he was using," says Pepers. "He was having problems with non-English characters, and working with him we were able to use his data to test character set encodings and their interaction in Quasar between Qt, Tcl, and the supported databases."
[ via NewsForge | Quasar Accounting finds move to open source adds up ]

That's the thing: Alone, best they could do was a clunky but functional package that would suit their customers so long as they were local to the partners and within reach of their expertise; now they have the benefit of many minds, many problem spaces, many channels of exertise who are also channels of potential sales leads.

To the purpose

The Free as in Freedom of Free Software grants your rights to have software that works for you, and if that means Norwegian characters, if that means a smooth install process, or in our own case here when we evaluated the prior free-beer/free-binary, if you need accounting software to interoperate with your accountant's data import/export system, then you need the code and the right to change it, and double points if there are others you can reach with the same itch and complementary skills.

... and now Quasar has both!