So I went to a Meetup.com Meet Up. The topic was MySQL and it was a bit frustrating because for the second meetup in a row I was stuck out side of a locked building unable to get in. After a bit of social engineering, I was in.

So the meetup is going really well. We were talking about MySQL and how it can be used to replace Oracle and MS SQL for any usage. And then the guy across from me talks about how he was on the team to integrate MySQL to Open COBOL.

Open COBOL. As in COBOL!. I was amazed. It never occurred to me that someone would be so interested in COBOL that they made an open source compiler for it. I was itching to talk about it with him, but there was no good way to bring it up in conversation (it was a meetup about MySQL anyhow).

So after the meet up we run over to Mavis Winkles for a pint. Over a half and half he tells me all about it. He was writing business logic for a company that sells medical supplies to insurance companies. He remembers all the COBOL he used to write in a previous life. So he looks into licensing a couple of versions, but you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. (for Micro Focus or IBM anyhow).

So he finds Open COBOL and starts checking it out. The rest is history. But the points he brought up were really interesting. He said he thought of COBOL as the original Domain Specific Language(DSL) which it really was, if you think about it. The original version lacked recursion, local variables, etc.

So this got me to thinking... In reality wouldn't see a lot more of things like COBOL in the future? It's full circle.. Just like the resurgence of thin clients in the enterprise that connect to high end servers on the back end. Soon you'll be back to desktops...

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

So I had to check it out. The website for OpenCOBOL reveals that they have added a lot of ancillary toolsets. They have integration with Databases (obviously including MySQL) and graphical front ends (TCL/TK). But the more interesting is their focus on compliance. Barring a few components they chose not to implement for lack of usage, they have very complete implementations of the standards.

Great stuff!

And the business model is pretty obvious. When you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of the insane salary required to keep people in the COBOL game, you also have to pay an insane amount to the few commercial providers that are left.

I hope these guys make a killing.