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 …
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
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
