[CentOS] COBOL

Wed May 21 20:57:37 UTC 2008
Ross S. W. Walker <rwalker at medallion.com>

Michael wrote:

> Just curious, maybe some old timers could help me out. I am working with 
> a company that is migrating 20 years of Mainframe Software Development 
> to Unix, HPUX. How much harder would it be to go to Linux, Centos Linux?
> 
> Also, anyone have any experience with Fujitsu Cobol on Centos? The 
> Fujitsu people only support Red Hat, and said I'd be on my own with 
> Centos. In other words if it works, then I don't care about Fujitsu 
> support.
> 
> I know some of you are thinking, did someone say "COBOL"? Nobody uses 
> COBOL anymore! If so, let me say "You are wrong". Many large 
> corporations are taking their old business logic that was written in 
> COBOL decades ago, and moving it to new modern platforms, like Linux. 
> Programatically giving these applications a GUI face-lift, while 
> maintaining their original business logic. I know because many companies 
> pay me to do just that. I have a client that wants to use Centos Linux 
> with Fujistu Cobol, and Fujitsu says it's gotta be Red Hat, any help 
> will much appreciated.

I would just buy the RH licenses for the project. CentOS may work well
for development and testing platform, but the production code should
be on fully supported RHEL.

I haven't done Cobol and Fortran programming since college where I
learned these on the DEC VAX VMS systems. It was interesting to see
VMS also running on the DEC Alphas at the time since I always
associated it with minis.

-Ross

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