This morning I awoke to a notice of a new release of GnuCash free personal financial management software. Version 2.2.1 of GnuCash is a bug fix release to the stable release version, 2.2.0. Anyone who wants immediate relief from any of the bugs listed below should go to the GnuCash site and download the new version.

The windows version can be found here, already compiled and ready to install and run. For everyone else, GnuCash 2.2.1 source code can be downloaded here.

Some of the bugs fixed in the new version are:

• Scheduled transactions templates and mortgage druid now use locale-specific delimiters
• Right-clicking a transaction in the register now selects the correct transaction for modification
• Corrected the "nearest in time" option commodity prices display in the balance sheet report
• Corrected the "Next" vs. "Forward" indescrepancy in dialog boxes
• Corrected a window resizing and display bug
• Corrected the Copyright year displayed in the "about" box
• Corrected various startup bugs
• Corrected some minor Accounts Report and Transaction Reports flaws
• GnuCash now properly saves Account Tree Sort preferences

Well you can tell the GunCash team really has been hard at work.

With the 2.2.0 release, GnuCash became available to Windows users for the first time. As a result, many new users are downloading and installing GnuCash on Windows. They're discovering not only how great free, open source personal software can be, but also how responsive the development team is to problems with the code.

It's just this kind of activity that has me sold on the open source concept. With free open source software, if you have a problem you're free to to straight to the development team and ask about it. If you've found a bug, you can report it directly to the people who wrote the code and watch as they correct it. You can even go into the source code and fix it yourself if writing code is your thing. The open source code submittal and review process ensures that all code submitted is safe and secure before it is released into the wild.

In fact, that's exactly the process by which GnuCash version 2.2.1 came into being. It's exactly why I have come to trust and accept GnuCash to run my own personal finances.