The Open Mainframe Project recently announced record growth in contributions, with more than 105.31 million lines of code written and more than 9,600 commits submitted by Open Mainframe Project communities so far this year. This is 100% more code than last year with an increased number of active participants in the 20 project and working groups. These numbers will only increase as Open Mainframe continues to be the cornerstone of governance and innovation for modernizing the mainframe and its path to IoT, Cloud and Edge Computing.
The Open Mainframe Project is intended to serve as a focal point for deployment and use of Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment. SHARE, IBM, Red Hat, and others are members of Open Mainframe Project. With a vision of open source on the mainframe as the standard for enterprise class systems and applications, the project’s mission is to build community and adoption of open source on the mainframe by eliminating barriers, demonstrating value of the mainframe on technical and business levels, and strengthening collaboration points and resources to help the community thrive.
“The introduction of the edge to mainframes has led to countless industry-changing innovations,” said John Mertic, director of program management at the Linux Foundation. “It is a signal of what’s to come with edge computing and beyond. Open Mainframe will continue to be the home of projects that help advance training, enterprise, DevOps and z/OS on a global scale and working closely with those thought leaders in technology adjacent to mainframes.”
- The COBOL Programming Course, which launched as a project in April of last year, has marked a milestone by becoming the first Open Mainframe Project to go through the lifecycle and become an active project just 1 year after launching. It is now fully mature and operating as an open, transparent, and sustainable project. Learn more in this blog.
- GenevaERS, which was launched last September, is the single-pass optimization engine for data extraction and reporting on z/OS. The project combines the processing power of GenevaERS, the reliability of the mainframe and the dynamics of an open-source community. Within the year, the project solidified a governance structure, grew the community base with active participants from different companies and created the GenevaERS R&D labs for exploring the architecture with other technologies like Apache Spark.
- Zowe continues to be one of the most popular projects under the Open Mainframe umbrella. It has brought new incubator projects that help explore its capabilities including:
- Workflow WiZardhelps developers and systems programmers simplify the generation and management of z/OSMF workflows. Contributed by BMC, this tool assembles a workflow by reading a library of workflow steps and a properties file. It determines which steps are needed based upon rules within these templates, orders them based upon step prerequisites, and writes out an XML file of the complete workflow.
- ZEBRAprovides re-usable and industry compliant JSON formatted RMF/SMF data records which enable ISV SW and users to exploit them using open-source software. Contributed by Vicom Infinity, Zebra project started as a Zowe Mentorship in 2020 but has grown significantly.
- New Working Groups
The Open Mainframe Project is launching two new working groups: the Debian s390x Working Group and the Open z/OS Working Group. Working Groups provide a vendor-neutral governance structure that allows members to collaborate to solve industry problems.
- Debian s390x Working Group
The new Debian s390x Working Group aims to oversee the maintenance of the s390x port to ensure it remains an official architecture for Debian. The group has already started collecting resources that will help build a community-driven effort to support the port. The long term goal is to secure an official maintainer who will lead the engagement and share resources and perspectives of the Debian project community. Learn more here.
- Open z/OS Enablement Working Group
The Open z/OS Enablement Working Group seeks to lower barriers to access z/OS, the premiere operating system for IBM System Z mainframes. As mainframes evolve, the shared nature of z/OS makes gaining access difficult. Unlike highly-partitioned cloud environments with no shared resources and thus low security risks, highly secured shared resources are the power behind z/OS. Learn more in this blog.
More information is available at www.openmainframeproject.org.