  Despite being proposed as early as 1959, COBOL (Common Business-Oriented
Language) still predominantly acts as an integral part of the majority of
operations of several financial, banking, and governmental organizations. To
support the inevitable modernization and maintenance of legacy systems written
in COBOL, it is essential for organizations, researchers, and developers to
understand the nature and source code of COBOL programs. However, to the best
of our knowledge, we are unaware of any dataset that provides data on COBOL
software projects, motivating the need for the dataset. Thus, to aid empirical
research on comprehending COBOL in open-source repositories, we constructed a
dataset of 84 COBOL repositories mined from GitHub, containing rich metadata on
the development cycle of the projects. We envision that researchers can utilize
our dataset to study COBOL projects' evolution, code properties and develop
tools to support their development. Our dataset also provides 1255 COBOL files
present inside the mined repositories. The dataset and artifacts are available
at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7968845.
