[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Scott Dorsey]

=?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>
>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.

It's true.  When I was starting out, every big DP shop had a systems 
programmer whose job was to add useful site-specific features to the OS,
and to do the primary diagnosis when problems were found in the OS.  They
might not have been able to fix bugs in the source but they could identify
where they were and they knew who to talk to at 1-800-IBM-CICS to get it
fixed.

As systems have become more complex and we have developed a greater need
for such people, we have been training fewer and fewer of them.

You could argue that the need for customized environments is reduced today,
now that standardized environments are more sophisticated.  I don't agree
with that at all but it is a thing which could be debated.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."