GNU projects seem to be in the season of releases with this week having GNU Octave 3.8 and GNUnet 0.10, while being prepared for release right now is the GnuCash 2.6 open-source accounting software.

GnuCash continues to serve as one of the few open-source accounting programs and with the 2.6 release there's new low-level features. With the GnuCash 2.6 release being announced on Sunday, they have now migrated from GConf to GSettings for their reference storage. GnuCash 2.6.0 also has new date handling, Guile 2 compatibility, improvements for custom reports and documents stored outside of GnuCash, and improvements to the Business Module.

GnuCash 2.6.0 is also now licensed under GNU GPLv2+ rather than just GPLv2 and there's been more than 500 bug-fixes. If you want to download GnuCash 2.6.0 right now you can find it from their SourceForge mirrors while more information on the project itself can be found from GnuCash.org. Sadly, GnuCash is still rather rudimentary and doesn't meet the needs for most business professionals. When checking out GnuCash 2.4, I'm still much better off using Intuit's proprietary web-based products paired with a spreadsheet or text file than this open-source accounting software package as Intuit's software is much more useful and complete.