The Alchemy Solutions Philosophy on COBOL Runtime License Fees

We believe that COBOL programmers deserve a reasonably priced COBOL compiler with high performance, unmatched reliability, superior scalability, and royalty free COBOL runtimes. Our customers have made it very clear they particularly like the last item, royalty free runtimes, indicating that they don’t always feel they have been fairly treated by other vendors in this area.

This was our view when we first introduced Fujitsu NetCOBOL to the worldwide market (as “Fujitsu COBOL”) back in 1994 long before Alchemy Solutions was spun off from Fujitsu and is still our view today.

Maintaining royalty free runtimes has sometimes been challenged by the introduction of new products and options that have suggested some kind of runtime based charging was the only way for us to recoup our investment in those developments. For example, with the earlier releases of NetCOBOL for .NET a model was introduced that charged for any .NET application deployed on multiple CPU machines because it was felt that we needed to cover the cases in which ASP.NET applications were being compiled on multiple CPU servers. This charge never sat easy with us so, with further thinking, we came up with a special Server Edition of the compiler that can be purchased to cover the need for compiling ASP.NET applications on production servers. That way our runtime support can be royalty-free while we are still paid for the use of our compiler – the part we believe justifies a charge.

For products that provide value outside support for the COBOL language, such as NeoKicks, which provides a transaction-supporting environment, there are still runtime related charges. We see these as special cases where a large part of the products’ value is in the support they provide at runtime.

COBOL has a bright future. Alchemy Solutions continues to invest in creating quality tools that deliver modernization strategies and Fujitsu continues to advance the NetCOBOL compiler technology. Keeping our prices consistent with this optimistic outlook helps keep NetCOBOL at the forefront of business programming in the 21st century, provides the foundation to earning your respect, and builds on our long-term, mutually beneficial business partnerships.