I find a good metric of Micro Focus’s rapacity is the cheapest cost for their X86 COBOL compilers. What’s it up to nowadays? Price ain’t even listed on their site (“contact our car salesman”). Gives you a good insight on how cost-competitive they are.
Micro Focus pats itself on the back over SUSE jettison as licensing revenue shrinks
Brit software house Micro Focus is bleeding licensing revenue as sales people abandoned the business for pastures new, according to half-year financials filed today with the London Stock Exchange. In the six months ended 30 April, sales for the unit fell 11 per cent year-on-year to $343.7m; the only product categories to see …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 9th July 2019 21:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Excellent word
https://www.wordnik.com/words/rapacity#
noun The character of being rapacious; the exercise of a rapacious or predaceous disposition; the act or practice of seizing by force, as plunder or prey, or of obtaining by extortion or chicanery, as unjust gains: as, the rapacity of pirates, of usurers, or of wild beasts.
noun The act or practice of extorting or exacting by oppressive injustice; exorbitant greediness of gain.
noun reprehensible acquisitiveness; insatiable desire for wealth (personified as one of the deadly sins)
noun extreme gluttony
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Tuesday 9th July 2019 22:20 GMT Mike 16
If your COBOL needs are small
I could probably sell you my 2-floppy set of Micro Focus COBOL for the PDP-11. That's two 8-inch Single-Sided Single Density, FWIW. At the time I bought that particular PDP-11, I checked (on a whim) that the software would transfer with the machine, but that was a while ago, so YMMV.
Finding a PDP-11 to run it on could be as simple as getting SIMH, but then Micro Focus probably has some objection to running in a VM.
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Tuesday 9th July 2019 23:19 GMT JLV
Re: If your COBOL needs are small
No worries. A while ago, I had (gasp) a gig in COBOL. I had last (extensively) done COBOL 15 yes before that.
Loaded a GNUCobol and did a few test pgms beforehand. All good in 2-3 hours max.
Not a hard language to be semi-proficient at, although the PIC redefinitions are both useful and a bit of a mindtwist. My biggest peeve was that the base language is extremely sparse. Want to left-pad a character string? Gotta reinvent that wheel yourself (in all fairness, that specific feature gap also almost led to a break-the-internet moment on Javascript IIRC).
Point I was making is that Micro Focus claims a heavy pound of flesh for a 60 year old compiler on which they probably do pretty much nothing nowadays. I’d call them parasites, except that I don’t want to disrespect tapeworms, leeches and Aedes aegypti.
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Wednesday 10th July 2019 12:23 GMT Ima Ballsy
Re: If your COBOL needs are small
Yeah, GNUCobol is pretty nifty , but still dislike the VSAM in it.
I've maintained that if MF (heee hee) wanted to introduce NEWBIES to Cobol, they would have made a free version available.
But it seems all the really want to do is suck the $$$$ from those that are STILL using Cobol.
I see them slowly circling the drain ...
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Wednesday 17th July 2019 17:22 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: If your COBOL needs are small
a 60 year old compiler on which they probably do pretty much nothing nowadays
Not even close to accurate. The MF COBOL compiler and runtime get significant feature upgrades every year. While the standard COBOL language hasn't changed much, except for the COBOL 2002 OO extensions which almost no one uses, the MF extensions, particularly for the managed-code environments and MF-proprietary simplified OO syntax, are relatively popular among the customer base and see significant innovation in each release.
This year's 5.0 release, for example, added .NET async support, among other things.
The other MF COBOL compilers (ACU eXtend, RM COBOL, etc) change more slowly, but they do get regular maintenance updates that fix bugs and improve performance.
As for pricing ... it's what the market will pay. That's how capitalism works.
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