FileMaker open source?

There are a couple topics here. One is FileMaker Pro vs. Open source, and the other is how to develop FileMaker solutions and release them as open source projects. For the first topic, you can listen to the related episode on my podcast with Matt Petrowsky, FileMaker Talk.

It's the latter that I'm thinking about: Releasing FileMaker solutions to the world, for free, creating a community around the product, and integrating code from the members of the community into the master.

First off, FileMaker doesn't lend itself to this as well as other platforms, since all the code, layouts, scripts, reports, etc, are all in one file. This makes it harder to be modular. That said though, this is really primarily a philosophy decision, and I think it comes down to this in many cases:

A commercial company owns the code, but take nearly all the direction from the customers. An open source project makes the code public, so the customers themselves must become programmers. Neither approach is perfect, and each will be successful in the right set of circumstances.

Mostly, I'm interested in vertical market FileMaker solutions, so let's consider what it would look like in a relatively small community, where there are maybe 1000 potential organizations that will use the software. The economics are very different for software that is used by a million people.

No programmer works for free, and all models for development must compensate the people who do the work. In the commercial model, it's the owner of the code that pays the programmers. People who buy the software only have to make feature requests to make future versions better. In the open source model, each company that wants to improve the system must pay their own people to gain expertise in that technology, and to develop code for their version, and hopefully submit that code to the master so other customers (their competitors?) may also benefit.

I think this is a bit less likely to happen for a vertical market. For open source to be successful here, a large organization probably needs to fund the initial development, and may need to continue funding development over time. In this model, it looks quite a bit like a commercial product.

Both commercial and open source get funding from support, maintenance, training, etc. In the open source world, this is possibly the only source of funding. For commercial software, it's a small source at first, and becomes the primary source of funds as the company grows and matures.

These are some of my thoughts on the subject. I'd love to hear your comments.

WebViewer Madness

We've had the WebViewer in FileMaker for a couple years now, but there are still some great uses for this being found. One of the main uses is the Data URL. This allows you to use HTML code without having to have an html file on disk. The source of data can be a field or a script variable.

You can read more about this by following the link to Geoff Coffee's blog entry on Six Fried Rice. I'll keep looking for more cool uses of this.

One of my favorites is to use the webviewer instead of a FileMaker calculation to show the current record number, and the current found count. This is great because it's context universal - you can copy and paste the object to any layout, any database, and it just works. In the end, it's a layout calculation, and is very easy to use.

As much as I love the WebViewer, one thing that's a bit of a pain is syncing up the font size with the FileMaker fonts, which look pretty much the same on Mac and Windows. This is not the case for web code. It varies quite a bit across different machines, so requires some work to make it look the same.