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A couple of days ago I got the news that MS Money is being cancelled. Of course, there were a lot of blogs with speculations about what the current users would do. BTW, some of those users are not even a month old, people who bought a product and now are suddenly noticed that the product will be cancelled. What happens with users who kept their financial information in that same product all this time?

One detail that struck me was that Intuit, the privative competitor of MS Money, mentioned they have a program to migrate the users to Intuit, but it will only work with files up to 10K transactions. As an example, my KMyMoney is 3 and a half years old and it has about that number. MS Money has been in the market since 1991. There are probably thousand of users who will depend on the whim of two companies, one which has just cancelled an unprofitable product, and the other which will try to get as many new customers as it can, at a price, of course. Once again, users will be held hostage and demanded a ransom to continue to have access to their own data.

Myself, I keep an old file of MS Money where I used to track my finances before migrating to Linux. I didn't export it at that time, and I don't have a Windows nor Money sitting around anymore, so I haven't had the chance to import it into KMyMoney yet. Too late now, I guess.

As free software developers, I think we have to work hard on ensuring not only the freedom of the source, documentation, and so on, but also of the information generated by the application. It has to be made available to the users, so that they do what they see fit with it, even if that includes switching application because this one is not the coolest, fastest or prettiest. We have an obligation to work with other application developers to make our formats as interoperable as possible, and avoid format lock-in as hell. That's what free stands for, not the price tag.