It seems that there a few broad problems with owning/using legacy COBOL:
1. It's usually run on a big, expensive mainframe.
2. Good developers run from it, so you're stuck with the coders left over from adverse selection
3. It has questionable modularity/maintainability and integration with more modern stuff is hard.
What opportunities are created by these problems?
My limited experience is that Mainframe COBOL systems (I know nothing of Microfocus) use either a database (DB2 usually) or large, random access flat files for persistence. COBOL programs are much like scripts run from within a transaction monitor. [Please correct me if I'm wrong here!]. Why has no one done a WINE-style implementation of the important APIs along with an interpreter so that existing code can be run on a horizontally-scalable platform? Mainframes are really expensive. Not only does IBM charge a lot, but you end up buying 3rd party software (ABEND-AID, I'm not kidding...) just to keep the lights on. Perhaps a distributed flat file implementation could be built to mimic 60's era data storage models. Does anyone do this? It seems like a great Open Source business as COBOL users are accustomed to paying for support and services. What do I not understand about this?
Micro Focus is a major player in bringing cobol onto Unix/Linux/Windows systems.
They've been around for 30 years, and they have a market cap of less than a billion dollars (converting from pounds to USD - they're based in the UK).
Their business is really old (but new by mainframe standards), and doesn't have nearly as much room to grow. Even if they double in size by cannibalizing mainframe sales, they'll be worth 0.01 Googles, or 0.05 Amazons. So there's just not enough potential in supporting this kind of junk (which is not a trivial thing technically - it's ALL messy backward compatibility stuff, and the jobs are really not intellectually appealing: just imagine telling yourself or your friends that you maintain a small part of a cobol compiler for a living).
And startups have virtually no chance at cannibalizing Micro Focus - it took MF a very long time to take any appreciable amount of business away from IBM's mainframes.
An intersting lack of success relative to the amount of legacy COBOL out there. Thanks for the info. I am reminded of the quote (recently popularized by Spolsky), "where there's muck, there's brass."
1. It's usually run on a big, expensive mainframe.
2. Good developers run from it, so you're stuck with the coders left over from adverse selection
3. It has questionable modularity/maintainability and integration with more modern stuff is hard.
What opportunities are created by these problems?
My limited experience is that Mainframe COBOL systems (I know nothing of Microfocus) use either a database (DB2 usually) or large, random access flat files for persistence. COBOL programs are much like scripts run from within a transaction monitor. [Please correct me if I'm wrong here!]. Why has no one done a WINE-style implementation of the important APIs along with an interpreter so that existing code can be run on a horizontally-scalable platform? Mainframes are really expensive. Not only does IBM charge a lot, but you end up buying 3rd party software (ABEND-AID, I'm not kidding...) just to keep the lights on. Perhaps a distributed flat file implementation could be built to mimic 60's era data storage models. Does anyone do this? It seems like a great Open Source business as COBOL users are accustomed to paying for support and services. What do I not understand about this?