Why Legacy COBOL Still Matters: Insights from the Open Mainframe Project

The COBOL Working Group, part of the Open Mainframe Project, is actively seeking developers to help document the current industry use of COBOL, the "ancient" programming language that remains essential in many enterprises.

Established in 2020, the group emphasizes that COBOL, a general‑purpose business language with over 60 years of history, is still widely deployed and continues to play a positive role in the global economy; the group and the Mainframe Project aim to promote and support its ongoing use.

Earlier this year, Micro Focus reported that it still builds a large business around supporting COBOL, estimating that 775‑8500 billion lines of COBOL code are in daily use worldwide, and that 92 % of surveyed organizations consider COBOL a strategic technology.

Because of its long history, many practitioners are nearing retirement, and some companies are even planning new open‑source compilers for the language.

During the COVID‑19 pandemic, the governor of New Jersey urged COBOL‑skilled professionals to assist, as state mainframes struggled under a surge of unemployment and relief applications.

The Working Group now intends to collaborate with Linux Foundation Research and Linux Foundation Training & Certification to conduct its own surveys.

The project’s goal is to collect statistical data on COBOL’s continued use in the IT industry, evaluate the value of ongoing investment by vendors, and explore modern use cases that support the digital era. It also seeks insights into future use‑case attitudes for COBOL applications.

Additionally, the group aims to gather detailed information from various industries and regions to inform strategies that describe the language’s current state comprehensively.

The Open Mainframe Project, founded in 2015 with IBM’s support and now managed by the Linux Foundation, promotes Linux and open‑source adoption in mainframe environments.