UniData/UniVerse were acquired by IBM and then spun off to form Rocket Software. As I recall (this could be total folklore) the product team wasn't getting the

UniData/UniVerse were acquired by IBM and then spun off to form Rocket Software. As I recall (this could be total folklore) the product team wasn't getting the love from IBM and managed to convince IBM to sell off the BU. Rocket and IBM have done a bit with U2 to open up the multi-value data files and UniBASIC programs to "open systems", i.e., Java, .NET, SOAP, REST-ish, etc. It's still a bit of a pain because values are strings, one has to extract MV/SV data by tokenizing along delimiters, there's a massive amount of data duplication (no FK relationships), multi-byte causes problems with older programs (and many, many of them are very old programs), and there's no concept of data queues as you might be expecting if you've worked in an OS/400|i Series|System i|i|etc. shop with RPG. That said, it runs happily on Linux and is quite robust. Many of the problems relate to programming practice. As you can imagine, there are some "lifers" who don't stretch themselves, argue GOTO vs. GOSUB, copy-and-modify existing programs for new requirements, and don't use source control or automated unit testing. Then there are those who refactor 17 copied versions of programs doing basically the same thing into a modular package and slap an object-ish API on top. With a rational approach, the environment is actually quite pleasant, but it does take some discipline. It is difficult to retrofit a more rigorous engineering process onto legacy code, but that's the case whether it's Pick/UniData or any other programming environment.