Snippet #848

The eternal struggle against vendor lock-in: this time trying to get some data our of some old FileMaker databases. Hoping I can extract it using the free trial (non-trial licenses start at $299), and get it into some open format; SQL, CSV, anything, even a text dump. There are some vendors I don’t really mind being "locked in" to — for example, I don’t mind building custom tooling to host my stuff on Amazon, as their prices are hard to beat, their stuff is still Linux at the end of the day, and my confidence that they won’t screw me over is high; likewise, I don’t mind entrusting stuff to Apple, as I’ll be using their hardware and software for the foreseeable future — but FileMaker Inc. is not one of those vendors.