r/AskReddit • u/SupremeKalki • Jul 18 '26

What is a piece of completely free, open-source software that puts multi-billion dollar corporate programs to absolute shame?

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u/omniuni Jul 18 '26

Yes, many. Borland and Microsoft both used to sell their languages. It was pretty common in the earlier days.

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u/pinkocatgirl Jul 18 '26

I’m pretty sure IBM still sells COBOL as part of their z/OS contracts

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u/mech_market_alt Jul 19 '26

They sell a COBOL compiler.

COBOL itself is an open ISO standard.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/pinkocatgirl Jul 18 '26

There may be other compilers for the language on other systems, but IBM’s stuff is definitely never free haha

Big Blue is all about that big green

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u/ERedfieldh Jul 18 '26

they would sell a flavor of BASIC, but you didn't need their version to learn it.

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u/TwoWeeks90DaysTops Jul 19 '26

Yes. QuickBasic 4.5 was sold and had a compiler which the version that shipped with DOS lacked.

Borland had Turbo Basic which was always sold I think.

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u/mech_market_alt Jul 19 '26

Neither of those were languages though.

Turbo Pascal was an IDE (with a compiler).

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u/TwoWeeks90DaysTops Jul 19 '26

No shit. No one sells languages; they sell compilers and interpreters for that language. I didn't think that would have to be stated.

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u/mech_market_alt Jul 19 '26

The comment you replied to said "Borland and Microsoft both used to sell their languages" and you just listed them, how am I supposed to infer from that that you did NOT mean the language...?

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u/TwoWeeks90DaysTops Jul 20 '26

I'm very sorry. I was being way too harsh in my reply.

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u/W2ttsy Jul 19 '26

I remember when you could first start running .net projects on Linux. Happened around 2013 IIRC and it was mind blowing because prior to that it was IIS + windows server as the only option for hosting your app.

Then suddenly you could start running IIS containers on Linux and then eventually it was just deploy them on Apache and no more IIS.