Given the more or less accurate information being spread
out on the net about us, we would like to clarify COBOL-IT's
position regarding a number of matters.
A bit more than one year ago, after that MF acquired Acucorp,
we all faced the same evidence, namely, that the market needed
another professional source for COBOL Compiler, provided by a
company that treats their customer well and provide them with
decent service and support. A company focused on delivering
solutions and services to professional organizations for
which security, reliability, confidentiality are vital.
We then decided to promote a separate compiler suite, and
we soon opted for OpenCOBOL as the base of our offering
because of its intrinsic virtues: quality, simplicity,
and portability.
At that time, we visited Roger While to see whether a
form of closer cooperation was possible. However, it
turned out that our commercial goals were too different
from his, and decided to branch out. Please appreciate
that despite such differences of appreciation, we are
in very good term with Roger, who has always been
kept up to date with our intentions and plans.
We then incorporated COBOL-IT in September 2008.
Our goal is to provide the market with a reliable and
full-featured COBOL compiler that comes with professional
support. Please do not misrepresent what we say.
We are not saying that the OpenCOBOL compiler as maintained
by Roger is not stable or not reliable. Our point is that
this compiler misses a number of serious features required
by the large corporations we're talking to, and that in
order to address this market efficiently, support based
on an open forum and goodwill just is not enough.
Our model is not based on letting the burden of configuring
and compiling the compiler to the end user, who often
does not have the skills to do so. That's why we provide
precompiled, ready to use binaries, even though our
source code is available.
We separate the public from the customer version of
the compiler. The public version is freely available
on our web site, while the customer version, with a
number of extended features, is reserved to our customers
only. We strictly respect the terms and the spirit of
the GPL license since the source of the public version
are sent on simple email request and our customers
always receive the sources code together with the
compiled binary.
COBOL-IT has improved on the original OpenCOBOL compiler
in a number of areas:
- It is certified - or in the process of being certified
with third party tools, including Pro*COBOL from Oracle,
Tuxedo, Syncsort, DB2, XFrame, UniKix, MySql, etc.
- We offer a SQL precompiler to target MySQL, PostgreSQL
and ODBC.
- Windows API calls (STDCALL) are now supported
- Mircosoft's Visual C compilers are supported as backend
- A number of features have been introduced to improve the
source level compatibility with MF
- We have thoroughly debugged and now support our version
of VBISAM
- We developed an Eclipse-based plug-in, to be released
in the coming weeks
- We provide a COBOL source-level debugger
- We provide a profiler
- We implemented a number of optimizations to make the
generated code closer in terms of performance to the
other players in the market
- We provide an external Sort module tool
We hope this explains how, while COBOL-IT is based on
OpenCOBOL, we believe that referring to it as
'Open COBOL with a new name' or a Clone of OpenCOBOL or
as a 'non friendly fork' is not accurate.
While it is rooted in OpenCOBOL, COBOL-IT is a separate
product with separate aims and separate ambitions, to
be used by separate sets of people. Our version diverges
from the original OpenCOBOL source a little bit more
every day, even if we keep an attentive eye on Roger's
excellent work, and we understand he does the same
with ours.
I hope that these explanations will help the OpenCOBOL
community to understand where we stand.
The COBOL-IT Staff