Open Mainframe Project Announces Continued Growth in Community Contributions and Adoption as Mainframes Accelerate Innovation in Enterprise Hybrid Technology

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 22, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Open Mainframe Project kicked off the 2nd annual Open Mainframe Summit today with news of record growth in contributions - with more than 105.31 Million Lines of Code written and over 9,600 commits submitted by Open Mainframe Project communities so far this year. This is 100 percent 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 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."

COBOL Survey Results are in

The COBOL Working Group, which launched last year as a response to the increasing interest in COBOL and the misinformation of it, aims to promote and support the continued use of the COBOL language globally. One of its first missions is to identify the COBOL market, challenges, concerns and how companies are addressing these issues. Spearheaded by Co-Chairs Derek Britton, Director of Communication and Brand Strategy at Micro Focus, and Cameron Seay, a professor from Eastern Carolina University, the COBOL Working Group launched a global survey to learn more. The results showcase that COBOL is a proven staple with hundreds of billions of lines of production code used across many industries. The COBOL Working Group is currently working on the statistics but is giving a preview of the data at Open Mainframe Summit. Learn more here.

COBOL Programming Course Makes History

The COBOL Programming Course, which launched as a project in April of last year, marked a milestone by becoming the first Open Mainframe Project to go through the lifecycle and become an active project just one year after launching. It is now fully mature and operating as an open, transparent and sustainable project. Learn more in this blog.

GenevaERS Graduates

GenevaERS, which was launched at the first Open Mainframe Summit 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's New Incubation Projects driven by BMC and Vicom Infinity

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 WiZard helps 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. Learn more in this Open Mainframe Summit session.
• ZEBRA provides 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. Learn more in this Open Mainframe Summit session.

Expanding Zowe Conformance to Support Providers 

The Zowe Conformant Support Provider Program gives vendors the ability to showcase their Zowe support competencies. The program is a little different from the Zowe Conformance Program that exists for APIs, Desktop Apps, and CLI plug-ins. Support providers self-attest to the criteria defined by the Zowe Technical Steering Committee, which gives consumers the confidence they need to use Zowe in business-critical environments. In addition to the launch of this program, we are also announcing both IBM and Broadcom as the initial Zowe Conformant Support Providers.

LAUNCHING NEW WORKING GROUPS

The Open Mainframe Project, an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared tool sets and resources, today announced the launch of 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.

WELCOMING EPAM Systems and IN-COM

Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the Open Mainframe Project is comprised of more than 45 business and academic leaders within the mainframe community that collaborate to develop shared tool sets and resources. Today, the project welcomes EPAM Systems a global provider of digital platform engineering and development services, and IN-COM, a leader in powerful application understanding tools, to its ecosystem.

"The mainframe is vital to top organizations globally," said Shlomo Friman, CEO at IN-COM. "The powerful technology we offer organizations ensures that every user is an expert with the knowledge to efficiently and accurately tackle projects. The new generation of professionals demand new generation tools that offer, among other things, fast and accurate code and impact analysis. Getting this mainframe talent pool off to the best start is a commitment Open Mainframe Project is pursuing. In the modern mainframe world, we are excited about offering a technology that bridges between the mainframe and all other systems and platforms, as this greatly supports modernization and transformation efforts. We look forward to collaborating with the Open Mainframe Project and its member companies."

Registration for Open Mainframe Summit, hosted virtually on September 22-23, will be open until Thursday, September 23. It is $50 for general attendance and $15 for academia.

Open Mainframe Summit is made possible thanks to Platinum Sponsors Broadcom, IBM, Rocket Software and SUSE; Gold Sponsors Micro Focus and Vicom Infinity; Silver Sponsor BMC; and Academic and Community Sponsors CD Foundation and FINOS.

About the Open Mainframe Project

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. 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 to Open Source adoption on the mainframe, demonstrating value of the mainframe on technical and business levels, and strengthening collaboration points and resources for the community to thrive. Open Mainframe Project is home to more than 20 projects working groups including ADE, Ambitus, ATOM, CBT Tape, COBOL Check, COBOL Programming Course, COBOL Working Group, ConsoleZ, Feilong, GenevaERS, Mainframe Open Education, Mentorship, Polycephaly, Software Discovery Tool, TerseDecompress, Tessia, Zowe, and Zorow. Learn more at https://www.openmainframeproject.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world's top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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SOURCE Open Mainframe Project

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