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Reasonally priced COBOL licenses 1

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webrabbit

MIS
Jan 31, 2003
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One of my cutomers has asked about converting my current DOS applications to Windows. The systems are written in Micro Focus COBOL. A developer's license is $3700, which seems reasonable to me. Unfortuneatly, their run-time licensing structure is such that the customer would have to pay $46,500! I consider this to be outrageous. Is ther another COBOL vendor who would have a more reasonable run-time licensing structure? We are talking of 60-70 users.
 
current options are

Acucobol - (price is hidden, too many questions asked)
RM/COBOL - (price is very straightforward (except for web based tools). no questions asked).
NetCOBOL - (straightforward price. buy over web).

The following are also still around but I do not know them.
IBM Visual Age COBOL
CA-Realia COBOL

For all the above I also recomend using SP2 from flexus. ( as the GUI interface, and also their Form Print tool.


Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd
 
For a 60 to 70 "end-user" situation, you MIGHT also want to contact your Micro Focus "sales representative". I believe that they have "multi-licensing" deals that MIGHT make this more cost-effective than a conversion from one vendor's COBOL to another (depending upon how many Micro Focus extensions your current applicaiton uses)

Bill Klein
 
Have you talked to MF about it? Again, it is my understanding that they do hvae some "bundles" (and individual developer prices) that MIGHT meet your needs.

Bill Klein
 
I have talked to them. The developer license is not an issue. The run-time bundles are the problem. My customer has only two users at most sites, but Micro Focus offers a minimum of ten licenses per bundle.
 
Micro Focus does not require a license at all for many applications. It depends on what you are doing. For example you can extract various applications which do not carry license fees from utils.lbr and still build. In fact if you are not using fileshare or intrinsic functions you may be able to do without utils.lbr altogether.

Are you talking about 4.0 COBOL or NetExpress?

Clive
 
According to their sales agent, NetExpress 4.0 is their latest compiler. Is this different from 4.0 Cobol?

Is it only their UTILS.LBR that requires a license? As my applications currently do not use this LBR, that may be then answer I need.
 
To the best of my knowledge, EVERY Micro Focus product since about 1995 has required run-time licenses for ALL applications.

I suggest that you check the license agreement, if you have any question about what is and is not legal to distribute without paying run-time licensing fees.

Bill Klein
 
webrabbit

The 4.0 that I was referring to is the first 32 bit GUI workbench which is what I thought you had. A good release of that was 4.0.32. Whether or not you need a license depends very much on what your application does and which runtime modules it needs. The is a doc file called licence.txt in the doc directory which indicates which modules require a license. Unneeded modules can be removed from the LBR files.

NetExpress at release 1.0 and 2.0 allowed you to distribute anything in the runtime for free. License fees were introduced again at version 3.1. The current version is 4.0. On the dialog system (part of NE) side nothing much has changed and screensets appear to be backward and forward compatible if imported with any 32 bit versions since 2.5.


Clive
 
Yeah, I remember 4.0.32. I did a project with that version on OS/2 with DB2/2.

The world "improved" since then.... or did it just change?
 
I prefer CA-REALIA without a run-time license, the reason why I bought it in the past.

I am busy with a connection between a program on the server and an end-user program that 'talks' with the internet-explorer, using soa-principles. The lay-out of the application is independ from the business logic.

Just some thoughts and before the end of the year - I hope - a running application for coaches and people being coached with both local, server and asp possibilities. Because it is under architecture, again the business logic is independent from the rest of the system.

If there was a sponsor, it would be possible to develop it a lot faster, but... I don't know investors in general software applications without a paying customer I am afraid....

Regards,

Crox
 
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