[CS-FSLUG] Mac vs Linux business software question
Frank Bax
fbax at sympatico.ca
Tue May 3 14:02:34 CDT 2005
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
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