An HP 3000 application vendor is starting an online discussion which it hopes will lead to HP’s release of COBOL II compiler source and utilities as Open Sourced software. Duane Percox, founder of Quintessential School Systems, which has more than 100 schools in its customer base, spoke up on the SIGCOBOL mailing list about getting HP’s COBOL resources into an open source status. QSS supplies applications which rely heavily on HP’s COBOL compiler.

Percox said his objective is to “get various HP COBOL technologies made available to assist in our collective migration efforts,” and wants to put together “a well constructed proposal, supported by the SIGCOBOL membership, that requests HP release source code to the following components: 1. Pre-compiler — so that anyone interested in supporting HP COBOLisms like macros can integrate support into their offerings; 2. Compiler front-end — so that anyone interested in supporting HP COBOL extensions can have easy access to the parsing/analysing of HP COBOL source code; 3. Compiler library — so that anyone interested in supporting/understanding HP COBOL specific implementations of support routines has easy access to the routines/methods/interfaces used, and 4. Sort/Merge and COBOL calling interfaces — so that anyone needing to develop/support HP compatible sorting can have easy access to the methods/interfaces used. I would also propose these ‘COBOL assets’ be released in such a way that anyone (commercial or Open Source) could make use of the technology so that the widest array of existing HP e3000 COBOL customers would benefit.”