[CS-FSLUG] Mac vs Linux business software question

[Frank Bax]

At 02:20 PM 5/3/05, R. Thompson wrote:
>      I'm back at it, looking at business software.  An interesting
>product I've found is Mac based:
>http://www.posdirect.com/proddetail.php?prod=SKFMP&PHPSESSID=717f604662e0e4c392481908f9d3adeb
>I've spoken to the sales people and they tell me that it may be edited
>using Filemaker 6 (a product I'm not familiar with).
>It seems that Mac OS X is well spoken of on this list, and I have not
>yet found affordable similar software for Linux.  Are there are opinions
>on whether to use Mac software for this application?  What is Filemaker
>6?  Is there an affordable similar Linux based product?


In the days (1980's) before SQL database servers were available for desktop 
machines, there were products like DOS-based programs like dBase and 
FileMaker.  These products were both a database engine and a development 
"language" - all in one package.  Basically the vendor is saying that their 
product was developed with the FileMaker 6 "language" and data is stored in 
FileMake (proprietary format) files.  If you purchase FileMaker 6 yourself, 
you could then access the database directly (even though its in a 
proprietary format).  This would allow you to "add-on" custom extensions to 
the software, or access the files directly if existing reports are not 
flexible enough.

In contrast to FileMaker, the file formats used by the dBase product were 
freely available (or were they reverse engineered?), so lots of tools (both 
free and commercial) were developed to read/write those files (now called 
XBase) on various platforms.  I have sometimes come across copies of 
FileMaker, but never ventured so far as to actually use it myself.  I did 
several years of software development using one of the XBase tools.

Sorry, but I'm not aware of any low-cost small-business packages; although 
I vaguely remember reading about some early FOSS attempts about 5 years ago.

Frank