Being “on the network” doesn’t mean there’s an accessible API. See QuickBooks Desktop. Intuit forces you into using their API, which is XML-based and ranges from slow to timing out.
Is the idea that someone will always reverse engineer it? Yes, but QuickBooks is brittle as is (you can count on at least one database corruption every year or two). I have zero interest in treading into unsupported territory when database corruption is involved and I’m likely going to need Intuit’s help recovering. We can try to restore from backup, but when there’s corruption it doesn’t always restore successfully, or the corruption was lingering silently for some time and rears its head again after a successful restore, and then we’re back to needing Intuit’s help.
Is the idea that someone will always reverse engineer it? Yes, but QuickBooks is brittle as is (you can count on at least one database corruption every year or two). I have zero interest in treading into unsupported territory when database corruption is involved and I’m likely going to need Intuit’s help recovering. We can try to restore from backup, but when there’s corruption it doesn’t always restore successfully, or the corruption was lingering silently for some time and rears its head again after a successful restore, and then we’re back to needing Intuit’s help.