The goal of SuperBOL (https://superbol.eu) is to allow companies to migrate from mainframes to Linux workstations, to get a "modern" experience of development and deployment.
Indeed, mainframes are hard to get access to, and require a training by themselves, I have worked on Linux and Windows for years, and development on a Mainframe has nothing in common :-)
I think the problem of COBOL is not only the lack of COBOL developers, it is the lack of expertise in COBOL environments, because they have become obsolete (both on mainframe and proprietary tooling for Linux/Windows). By providing a modern environment on Linux for COBOL, our goal is to solve the hardest part of the problem, as learning COBOL itself is not so hard for existing open-source developers...
Indeed, mainframes are hard to get access to, and require a training by themselves, I have worked on Linux and Windows for years, and development on a Mainframe has nothing in common :-)
I think the problem of COBOL is not only the lack of COBOL developers, it is the lack of expertise in COBOL environments, because they have become obsolete (both on mainframe and proprietary tooling for Linux/Windows). By providing a modern environment on Linux for COBOL, our goal is to solve the hardest part of the problem, as learning COBOL itself is not so hard for existing open-source developers...