FusionCharts Free is Now Open Source

FusionCharts Free is now open-source under the GPL and MIT licenses. In this post, you’ll discover what fusion charts can achieve as an open-source project and how the software can help developers create visually appealing dashboards for web and mobile projects. Because of its thorough documentation, cross-browser support, and consistent API, it is now easier than ever to add interactive, responsive charts and Live charts, such as heatmaps, radar, and stock charts, that display real-time data visualizations to your website.

What Does This Mean for You?

A lot. But in a nutshell, here’s what you can do with FusionCharts Free:

• Use it for any purpose, commercial or personal.
• Modify its source code to suit your needs.
• Share it with your friends and neighbors.
• Re-distribute FusionCharts Free, modified, or the way it is, as part of your software or hardware applications.

Why Choose Open Source?

There is one main reason why we decided to go open-source. It’s a slightly longer explanation, but we would be glad if you stayed with us on this. Charting is a very generic product. No, not the Microsoft Office type-generic, but a wide variety of people still uses it. Different people with different technical backgrounds and different requirements. While the BI folk would like the charts to make for a comprehensive reporting experience, the people using them in Facebook applications would like to see striking graphics and cool animations. And then there are the people who use it in networking tools, website analytics, health monitors, surveys, etc. While we could patiently sit down on a lazy Sunday afternoon and try granting all your wishes, let’s accept it – YOU know best what you need. Figuring out everything that you need and, more importantly, how you need it will be a pretty long-winded process for us. Also, it would not be too wise to overwhelm new users with thousands of features when a simple animated chart is all they need. And what’s that thing called file size? With FusionCharts Free as open-source, you can take up the source code and keep what you like, throw what you do not, add what you would like. Just do everything to make it perfectly suited to your needs.

More Than Just Source Code

Someone famous once famously said, “A project does not become open source simply by publishing its source code.” We couldn’t agree more. While we would be pretty happy if you made FusionCharts Free entirely suited to your requirements, we would be even happier if you could share that with the community. Did you:

• Find a bug?
• Add a new data input method?
• Improve the cosmetics?
• Add more customization options?

Please keep us in the know by dropping in a mail at support@fusioncharts.com. Everything that we find particularly cool will be in our Community Showcase with all relevant credits.

A Little Spark

There are lots of things that you can customize now with the source code in your hands. So how about giving your imagination a tiny little spark, and then you can pump in some more and ignite a fire?

• Bigger anchors on hover: Currently hovering on an anchor in a line chart, the tooltip corresponding to that data point is displayed. Additionally, you could make the anchor bigger and show a vertical line in the background to mark out the hovered data point.

  Possible Customization: Bigger anchors

• Slanted labels: Yes, some names can be pretty long. So how about adding support for slanted labels rather than just the horizontal and vertical labels that are supported now?

  Currently supported: Horizontal (and vertical) data labels

  Possible customization: Slanted data labels

• Add new attributes: You could add new attributes, like displaying the company name right at the top of every chart. Or add fade-in or bounce effects to the chart animation, and then provide an option to choose from one of the numerous animation styles.

The possibilities are endless! What is the first thing you would like to modify in FusionCharts Free? Will you be looking at building a new chart or just enhancing the existing ones? What does FusionCharts Free going open-source mean to you? Do let us know. It matters. Oh, and just in case you still haven’t got your hands on FusionCharts Free, you can do it now.