Its first use was in the development of medical applications for the Veterans Administration, now called the Department of Veterans Affairs, a branch of the United States Government. Since it was a work created by the government, a copyright cannot be placed on the source code, making the source code in the public domain. Because of this, it has been used for rapid development of applications across a number of organizations, including commercial products.
FileMan may be used standalone, or may be used with the VA Kernel, which provides an operating system neutral environment for applications.