[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/20/2023 8:15 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2023-02-17, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> On 2/17/2023 1:35 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2023-02-17, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>> On 2/17/2023 10:53 AM, bill wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> While I think DIBOL is a pretty cool language, too, it suffers from
>>>>> the same stigma as BLISS.  Not generally available.  COBOL is.
>>>>
>>>> Bliss is let us call it an "ex-DEC whatever" language.
>>>>
>>>> But I believe Dibol is available on VMS, Windows, Linux, AIX,
>>>> HP-UX and everything that supports .NET (Windows, Linux, macOS).
>>>> That is not everything with Cobol but it is a bit more than Bliss.
>>>
>>> The main problem is that it's a language that's controlled by one
>>> company and which you can only buy from them.
>>
>> Sorry, but I do not see this as a problem.
> 
> Yeah, I'm sure all those Java users _really_ appreciate what Oracle have
> just done to them... :-)
> 
> Fortunately, at least with Java, there are options that some will be able
> to move to.

In that particular case they can move from Oracle Java to
OpenJDK that is build from the same source code as Oracle Java.

The open source idea certainly works here.

But it is worth noting that if OpenJDK had not been created,
then there may still have been alternatives. There were
other Java implementations around - they died when OpenJDK
was created, but if OpenJDK had not been created then the
alternatives may have existed today (Apache Harmony effectively
died when IBM started supporting OpenJDK).

Arne