OT: Cracking Quickbooks format

[Vaughn Treude]

Hello:
For quite some time I've been wanting to move my company books form 
QuickBooks to GnuCash or some other Linux application.  I was having 
difficulty finding a way to convert my existing data, but I 
procrastinated.  Recently something happened that convinced me to do it. 
  Sad story follows:

I have a copy of QB Pro 99 I need to move to a newer Windoze computer, 
yet when I installed it, it refused to read my data files, because they 
were from a "newer" version.  Huh? What I believe caused that is the 
fact that I allowed Intuit to update my QB99 online.  I've posted a 
question to their forum.  If their answer is "buy a new version", I 
swear I'll never give Intuit another nickel.  I did some searching and 
discovered a product called DataBlox  (a Windows product, at 
datablox.com) which claims to be able to extract data from all QB 
formats.  It costs $99 and even if this is more expensive than buying a 
new QB, at least I wouldn't be giving my money to Inuit.

Does anyone know of any cheaper alternatives?  I'm having trouble 
locating "quickbooks hacks" because there are at least 100 programs out 
there to recover lost QB passwords, which causes Google to return a lot 
of noise.

While googling I've also found a lot of examples of Intuit's obnoxious 
business practices.  The worst was requiring banks to pay extra to 
support Quicken for Mac, which means that a lot of banks won't support 
Mac users, even though THE FILE FORMAT USED IS IDENTICAL.  It is an a 
totally artificial crippling of the product.  (BTW, the poster found a 
workaround by configuring his copy of QB with a different bank's ID.) 
Intuit is probably losing money doing this - unless MS is paying them 
off to discourage the Mac - which I doubt, since MS makes most of its 
money on Office, not the OS.

Intuit is evil!

Vaughn