Open COBOL has been a labour of love for more than 10 years now.
It is here, and it is
worth the wait.
For Open COBOL to succeed it needed to implement at least as much of the 1985 and 2002 COBOL standards as the
major vendors do. Generally, at least as far as the procedural core of the language goes,it does better,
but more advanced features like Object Orientation, Report Writing and COM support are still in the pipeline.
For people to even entertain using it commercially, it had to be reliable, and it must be possible to port
existing applications to it with very little problem.
Although the jury is still out, and will be until there is an established commercial base, the new release of
Open COBOL looks like meeting all of these criteria.
For programmers using new technology, but being required to manage legacy COBOL applications, this is a very
good chance to have a private copy of a COBOL compiler to experiment with.
COBOL21 will be watching Open COBOL with interest. Many of the people who frequent the comp.lang.cobol (CLC) Usenet Group are
possible Open COBOL users. We will be providing articles, background, and experiences from
people using Open COBOL, and will try to explain some of the Open Source software (which may be unfamiliar to people in CLC)
that is available with it.
Here are some local links to topics on Open COBOL...
Bill Klein's Installation Guide 
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William M. Klein is a frequent contributor to CLC and a mine of information on COBOL
and the complex web of standards around it. Bill has installed Open COBOL and produced this Guide specifically
for people unused to Open Source environments. Download the document in .PDF format by clicking
the icon; read the document online by clicking
here.
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