Howdy yall!

We've been talking about all the exciting things that Roger has done with Open Cobol. Thanks to his hard work and dedication OC is really a workable solution for so many of us and so many projects that we have in mind. More and more of us are starting to talk and collaborate on using OC to compile COBOL programs that meet the needs of all of us at large.

Some examples include a potential code generator, some open Accounting modules, Payroll, employee timeclocks and lots of other things. We're also talking about battering out some standards for how, we as a group that share COBOL code with each other, write our code. Copybooks are something that we most definitely need. Such as a copybook for connecting to MySQL or Postgres, even Oracle. Since OC has an excellent CALL statement, we could use this to achieve our ends without burdening Roger. Copybooks for web server variables, GETS and POSTS or for sending web pages back out (CGI) are a desired goal as well. Of course, this is just a brief list of ideas and we've not fleshed them out here. I'm just throwing them to yall so that you can get an idea of the scope several of us OC users are thinking.


In all of this of course we have a lot of practical considerations. To achieve and sort of real success we need to put our minds together. Of course those of us involved so far, are leaning towards our combined code being FOSS (GNU GPL2/3?). So anyone that participates, and even those that do not, would be able to take our work, expand upon it and use it in interesting ways.

With that in mind a few of us are going to meet on an upcoming Saturday in IRC. After we are together I might connect up WEBEX just so we can talk in voice. Or perhaps just SKYPE or some similar tool. However IRC should be enough to get us going on these tasks. Even if you are new to COBOL, or are just interested in watching the proceedings, or throwing out ideas for tools you would like to see developed, you are more than welcome to come. The more the merrier.

Where: FREENODE IRC
Channel: #add1tocobol
When: To be announced. Please let me know your preference.
If at all possible please state your time and time zone
UTC. Most likely though we are leaning towards Morning,
about 9am Eastern Time. That's UTC - 5 hours.
So UTC Time is: 2:00pm (14:00).

We have a lot to start knocking out and look forward to all that wish to come. I do want to emphasize this is not a projected supported or endorsed by Roger or Open Cobol. We're just some folks getting together on our own. Also we wont be working on the Open COBOL compiler code. Rather, we will be working on code in COBOL itself.

Any questions feel to email me or contact us via #add1tocobol on Freenode. If you go into the channel, msg me directly and be aware please you might have to wait a while. Lots of us that are there are very busy. But if you are patient and wait, we'll say hi as soon as we are at our computers and see you there.