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GnuCOBOL

GnuCOBOL is a free COBOL compiler. Built with GNU autotools, ./configure, make.

OpenCOBOL

GnuCOBOL is the new name for OpenCOBOL. September 27th, 2013 OpenCOBOL was accepted as an official GNU project, and renamed to GnuCOBOL (with the name GNU Cobol from September 2013 to September 2014).

COBOL

Below is a copy of the long standing acknowledgment request that appears in all versions of the CODASYL COBOL Journal of Development and ANSI/ISO COBOL standards.

Any organization interested in reproducing the COBOL standard and specifications in whole or in part, using ideas from this document as the basis
for an instruction manual or for any other purpose, is free to do so. However, all such organizations are requested to reproduce the following acknowledgment
paragraphs in their entirety as part of the preface to any such publication:

with respect, the acknowledgement:

COBOL is an industry language and is not the property of any company or group of companies, or of any organization or group of organizations.

No warranty, expressed or implied, is made by any contributor or by the CODASYL COBOL Committee as to the accuracy and functioning of the programming system and language. Moreover, no responsibility is assumed by any contributor, or by the committee, in connection therewith.

The authors and copyright holders of the copyrighted materials used herein

FLOW-MATIC (trademark of Sperry Rand Corporation), Programming for the UNIVAC (R) I and II, Data Automation Systems copyrighted 1958, 1959, by Sperry Rand Corporation; IBM Commercial Translator Form No. F28-8013, copyrighted 1959 by IBM; FACT, DSI 27A5260-2760, copyrighted 1960 by Minneapolis-Honeywell

have specifically authorized the use of this material, in whole or in part, in the COBOL specifications. Such authorization extends to the reproduction and use of COBOL specifications in programming manuals or similar publications.

Any organization using a short passage from this document, such as in a book review, is requested to mention "COBOL" in acknowledgment of the source.

Many thanks to the original designers, supporting organizations and individuals.

License

The Free Software Foundation Inc, now holds the official copyrights to all OpenCOBOL, GNU Cobol, and GnuCOBOL source code, dating back to 2001. This legal paperwork was put in place in May of 2015.

Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Written by Keisuke Nishida, Roger While, Ron Norman, Simon Sobisch

The GnuCOBOL compiler is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

For Files in the libcob/ directory:

The GnuCOBOL runtime library is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
See the GNU General Public License for more details.

The former license applies to current versions.
For GnuCOBOL / GNU Cobol and OpenCOBOL versions prior to 2.0 it is GPL version 2 or later for the compiler, LGPL 2 or later for the runtime.

More information

Please see the GnuCOBOL website and the Manuals and Guides for further information including notes about latest releases.

Of course, as a GNU project, info cobc, after an install, will display online documentation as well as cobc and cobcrun supporting --help.

Further entries in this wiki, which itself may be temporary only, are about GnuCOBOL's internals which are mostly useful for developers of GnuCOBOL or people that want to understand its source code.

Contributors

As the copyrights for this GNU free software project are held by the Free Software Foundation, contributors are required to fill out either copyright disclaimers or (preferred) copyright reassignment forms before contributions can be distributed as part of the official GnuCOBOL source kit. If you are interested, please see the [Copyright reassignment] page for details. That page has a choice of forms that can be emailed to the FSF legal department to request more formal signature documents.

Please note that contributions need not be limited to just compiler related source code that require copyright reassignments. You can help the project in many ways; bug reports being a very helpful step, as is general COBOL documentation, tutorials, and GnuCOBOL promotional material. We still need a nice logo and webpage banner, hint hint, nudge nudge.

The GnuCOBOL project also includes a contrib/ source tree that accepts sample programs, tools and other materials that are not part of the compiler proper, but aid in development and educational areas. As long as the license is an acceptable free software license, just drop a note in the discussion forums and the project staff will be glad to provide write access to this repository. These entries do not require formal rights reassignments, but do need to be freely licensed.

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The wiki has pages for

• [COBOL acknowledgement] from the original COBOL specification, shown above
• [Hacking GnuCOBOL]
• [Copyright reassignment], for details on formal contributions and legal requirements
• [Style guide], for those writing patches for GnuCOBOL

SourceForge info

Project Admins:

• Bernard Giroud
• Simon Sobisch
• Roger While
• Keisuke Nishida
• Brian Tiffin

[GnuCOBOL project members], a page generated by SourceForge