Open Mainframe Project is a Collaborative Project managed by the

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects. Background The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and prom ...

to encourage the use of

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

-based operating systems and

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

s. The project was announced on August 17, 2015, and was driven by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

, a major supplier of mainframe hardware, as well as 16 other founding members, that included

SUSE Suse may refer to: * Fort Suse, a military installation in the Kurdistan region of Iraq * Suse Heinze (1920–2018), German diver See also * SUSE (disambiguation) * Sus (disambiguation) * Susa, an ancient capital of Elam and the Achaemenid Emp ...

CA Technologies CA Technologies, Inc., formerly Computer Associates International, Inc., and CA, Inc., was an American multinational corporation, multinational enterprise software developer and publisher that existed from 1976 to 2018. CA grew to rank as one o ...

BMC Software BMC Software, Inc. is an American multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting, and enterprise software company based in Houston, Texas. History The company was founded in Houston, Texas, by former Shell employees Scot ...

Compuware Compuware Corporation was an American software company based in Detroit. The company offered products aimed at the information technology (IT) departments of large businesses, and its services also included testing, development, automation and p ...

as well as clients and partners such as RSM Partner, Vicom Infinity, L3C LLP and ADP, and academic institutions such as

Marist College Marist University is a private university in Poughkeepsie (town), New York, Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. Marist was founded by the Marist Brothers, a Catholic Church, Catholic religious institute, in 1905 to prepare brothers for their ...

and

University of Bedfordshire The University of Bedfordshire is a Public university, public research university with campuses in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, England. The university has roots in further and higher education from 1882: it gained university status in 19 ...

. Coincident with the announcement, IBM also announced a partnership with

Canonical The adjective canonical is applied in many contexts to mean 'according to the canon' the standard, rule or primary source that is accepted as authoritative for the body of knowledge or literature in that context. In mathematics, ''canonical exampl ...

to make the

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

operating system available for their high-end z Systems hardware. Development priorities for the project in 2016 include

OpenJDK OpenJDK (Open Java Development Kit) is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). It is the result of an effort Sun Microsystems began in 2006, four years before the company was acquired by Oracle Corp ...

, Docker, and

Hyperledger Hyperledger (or the Hyperledger Project) is an umbrella project of open source blockchains and related tools that the Linux Foundation started in December 2015. IBM, Intel, and SAP Ariba have contributed to support the collaborative development ...

. In February 2016 the Linux Foundation announced new members had joined the Open Mainframe Project:

Hitachi Data Systems Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) was a provider of modular mid-range and high-end computer data storage systems, software, and services. Its operations are now a part of Hitachi Vantara. In 2010, Hitachi Data Systems sold through direct and indirec ...

, Sine Nomine Associates,

East Carolina University East Carolina University (ECU) is a public university in Greenville, North Carolina, United States. It is the List of universities in North Carolina by enrollment, fourth largest university in North Carolina and the only one in the state with s ...

, and DataKinetics, a 35% expansion in the overall membership. Canonical, the organization behind Ubuntu, has also joined. Part of the announcement was the launch of a summer intern program.

Projects

Zowe

Zowe is the first open source project for

z/OS z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions.Starting with the earliest: ...

. It was announced in August 2018 at SHARE in St. Louis together with the open beta release of version 0.9 that contained contributions from

Computer Associates CA Technologies, Inc., formerly Computer Associates International, Inc., and CA, Inc., was an American multinational enterprise software developer and publisher that existed from 1976 to 2018. CA grew to rank as one of the largest independent ...

, and Rocket Software. Version 1.0 was released in February 2019. In September 2019 Phoenix Software International obtained Zowe conformance for their (E)JES Command Line Interface plugins and REST API extension. Zowe narrows the skills gap between new and legacy z/OS developers by offering the choice to work with z/OS either through a

Command Line Interface A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternati ...

, a "Zowe Explorer"

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development ...

extension, a web browser served from the Zowe Application Framework, or through REST APIs and web sockets served through the API Mediation Layer. Zowe is an extensible platform for tools, and provides the ability for extension through CLI plugins, new applications to be added to the web desktop, and onboarding of REST APIs to the API Mediation Layer. The Zowe conformance program provides certification accreditation to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and System Integrators (SIs) building and distributing Zowe extensions.

References

External links

* Linux Foundation projects IBM {{mainframe-compu-stub