Otterkit COBOL
Fiscal Host: Open Source Collective
A free and open source Standard COBOL compiler for .NET
Today's Balance
$0.00
Work Independently Goal
$5,250
per month
Contribute
Become a financial contributor.
Financial Contributions
Recurring contribution
You're Amazing Tier 🚀
You're amazing, you'll help pay for 10 coffees for the Otterkit team.. nah just joking, you'll allow us to stay much more focused on improving Otte... Read more
Starts at
$100 USD / month
Recurring contribution
Enterprise Tier I 💼
You'll be helping us stay much more focused on improving Otterkit, fixing bug issue and replying to PR requests. We'll also be able to focus more o... Read more
Starts at
$1,000 USD / month
Recurring contribution
Enterprise Tier II 💼
You'll be helping pay for a core developer's monthly expenses, allowing them to focus on the project full time. They'll be able to work exclusively... Read more
Starts at
$2,500 USD / month
Otterkit COBOL is all of us
Our contributors 1
Thank you for supporting Otterkit COBOL.
About
Otterkit is an effort to fully modernize the COBOL ecosystem by building a standard-conforming implementation (instead of a dialect) and to give developers access to modern COBOL build tools and a better development experience.
The current situation regarding the COBOL ecosystem presents a unique opportunity for our project to create a unified and open platform for COBOL development.
Although paying for a compiler may be feasible for larger companies, it creates a barrier for individual developers and students who wish to learn COBOL or stay up-to-date with its latest features. Those compilers, often behind closed ecosystems with considerable licensing fees and incompatible dialect specific features have sadly brought the language to a standstill, now almost relegated to legacy systems.
Our project aims to provide a free and open source compiler that follows the COBOL standard and built on top of the latest and greatest tech, making it accessible to everyone and hopefully helping unify the fragmented ecosystem.
By embracing open source modernization efforts, we can pave the way for a brighter future for COBOL and allow a new generation of programmers to learn and use the language effectively.
Otterkit will support newer COBOL features such as (but not limited to): Generic classes and interfaces, method overloading, multiple inheritance, auto-implemented properties, dynamic size items and tables, and asynchronous messaging (new in COBOL 2023).
By supporting the Otterkit project you'd be helping shape the future of COBOL and you'd give us the opportunity to lead future modernization and teaching efforts with a fully free and open source solution.
You will also make it possible for us to fully focus on developing and improving the project by not having to worry about potential financial hardships.
We're fully committed to help improve and modernize the COBOL ecosystem through open source solutions!
Note: We may add a language extension plugin system or a way to port your codebase in the future, but it's not our main focus at this early stage.