[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/26/2023 3:14 PM, bill wrote:
> On 2/26/2023 10:05 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> On 2023-02-25 13:00, Neil Rieck wrote:
>>> (CAVEAT: the down side of opensource is that if you discover a bug, 
>>> it may take years to get it fixed. In some instances you are better 
>>> off fixing the problem yourself then submitting the solution to the 
>>> authors. This has happened to me more times than one would think. 
>>> This happened to me last week with the python SOAP library known as 
>>> zeep)
>>
>> That downside is also an upside. If you discover a bug you do not have 
>> to wait for the author to fix it. If it is urgent/important, you can 
>> fix it immediately yourself. I would say that is a *big* upside.
> 
> That only works if you still have a real IT Department. Too many
> businesses have outsourced all of this to the cloud and different
> kinds of OPC (Other People's Computers) leaving themselves at the
> mercy of other people to keep their business going.  The IT world
> has become no different than all the other business with supply
> chain problems because they decided having it done in another
> country was a wise decision.

Even if the company has kept an IT department with
software developers, then very few companies has
the necessary skill sets or the financials to fund fixing
large complex open source software like an OS or
a RDBMS.

Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, LibreOffice etc. are used
by hundreds of thousands or millions of companies
world wide. But how many of them could and would
take on fixing bugs in the source. I suspect that
would be counted in a few thousands.

Arne