The Open Mainframe

Mainframes still form the foundation of many critical industries today: Banking, finance, travel and government, to name just a few. There are billions of lines code currently running on mainframes that, in one way or another, need to be maintained or modernized as the pool of developers skilled in mainframe technology shrinks. But how can you foster a culture of learning and innovation and ensure this valuable knowledge and these educational resources are handed down to the next generation of mainframe developers? The answer is simple -- Mainframe Open Education (MOE). Mainframe Open Education is a community partnership that focuses on ‘open sourcing’ mainframe learning roadmaps and community knowledge transfer. The mission is to offer all mainframe users a platform to cultivate skill onboarding that is most critical to future hires and to allow for knowledge sharing and community contribution. In this episode of The Open Mainframe, hosts Alan Shimel and John Mertic are joined by leaders JJ Lovett (Broadcom), Viviane Sanches (Kyndryl), and Tiiso Senosha (Open Mainframe Mentor). This panel discussion will provide an overview of the Mainframe Open Education initiative. We will review the milestones since inception, discuss new badges and mentorship program opportunities and talk about what's to come in mainframe education.

The Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe is marking a major milestone next month: The fifth anniversary of its launch. Zowe is an integrated and extensible open source framework for z/OS that combines the past and present to build the future of mainframes. Zowe offers modern interfaces to interact with z/OS and allows you to work with z/OS in a way that is similar to what you experience on cloud platforms today. You can use these interfaces as delivered or through third-party plugins and extensions.In this episode, Alan Shimel and John Mertic are joined by experts Rose Sakach (Broadcom), Joe Winchester (IBM) and Mike Siemasz who will share details about what Zowe is, how far the community has come, conformance programs, where the project will go next and more. https://openmainframeproject.org/community/events/

Open Mainframe Summit aims to connect and inform all those interested in growing the use of mainframes and related technology in dynamic technical and educational sessions. It is open to students, developers, corporate leaders, users and contributors of projects from around the globe looking to learn, network and collaborate. It will feature content tracks that tackle both business and technical strategies for enterprise development and deployment. This year, the premier mainframe event will be co-located with two industry conferences - IBM TechXchange Conference 2023, hosted in Las Vegas on September 11-14; and Open Source in Finance Forum, hosted in New York City on November 1. In today's episode hosts Alan Shimel and John Mertic are joined by panelists that include speakers, sponsors and Open Mainframe Project Leaders who can discuss what we're looking forward to for this year's event. Len Sentalucia, (Chair, Open Mainframe Project Governing Board and CTO Viacom Infinity), Rick Perret (member, Open Mainframe Project Marketing Committee, Open Mainframe Summit sponsor and Head of Analyst Relations and Open Source Marketing at Broadcom), Donna Hudi (member, Open Mainframe Summit Program Committee and CMO at Phoenix Software) and Elizabeth Joseph (Open Mainframe Summit Speaker and Global Head of the OSPO for IBM zSystems)

What does it take to develop successful, scalable and sustainable open source project? John Mertic, executive directop ar of The Open Mainframe Project, Linux Foundation, joins as an author and guest rather than in his regular co-host role with Alan. John shares how his journey in open source led him to write his book, Open Source Projects - Beyond Code. In the book, John explores what it takes to develop a successful, scalable and sustainable open source project. He'll also cover licensing, governance, community building, ecosystem management and how to grow the number of maintainers and contributors to a project. John’s book is available at https://www.amazon.com/Open-Source-Projects-blueprint-sustainable-ebook/dp/B0BY97937R

The financial services industry has been a long-time consumer of open source software, using it to power innovation and deliver seamless, delightful customer experiences on the front end. Behind the scenes, the mainframe has been the traditional workhorse, providing the processing power necessary to handle workloads for the world’s largest banks and Fortune 500 organizations. As financial institutions face new pressures from market entrants, regulations and dynamics, the industry will continue to evolve, both in front of the curtain and behind the scenes. Hosts Alan Shimel and John Mertic are joined by Rune Christensen (Bankdata), Tracy Ragan (DeployHub), Lee Santalucia (Vicom Infinity) and Gabriele Columbro (FINOS) for a discussion on all aspects of fintech, open source, COBOL and mainframe modernization.

During the pandemic, there was an increase in contributors and momentum across almost all open source communities. But with that, challenges also increased including risks and vulnerabilities with third-party software, tools and processes. These challenges have many people asking the same question - can open source be secure?Hosts Alan Shimel and John Mertic are joined by panelists Kate Stewart (Dependable Embedded Systems), Alan Clark (SUSE), Mark Ackert (Broadcom)to share their perspectives on security, which is top of mind for many companies around the world.

While you might think of the mainframe as a relic from an earlier computing era, these mega machines still play a role inside large institutions running intensive workloads. The Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe project currently has more than 20 projects and working groups, and over the last few years has successfully built many open source tools and technologies for Linux mainframes. The community has been an integral part of introducing a new generation of developers to mainframes and helping users overcome common development issues. Open Mainframe continues to be an innovative pipeline that enables companies to gain the most from their mainframe, to drive new mainframe innovations and make mainframe technology and use more accessible for everyone. In this episode, our panel of experts will discuss the milestones met by the project last year and what to expect in 2023, including increased security and hands-on training. You'll hear from leaders of a few of Open Mainframe’s most popular projects including the COBOL Programming Course, Mentorship Program and Zowe.

COBOL has a long and illustrious history; after all, not many other languages have been in use since 1959 and are still going strong! But far from being a relic, COBOL continues to evolve and is finally getting the credit it deserves. The Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Working Group, which launched in 2020 as a response to increasing interest in COBOL (and misinformation about it), aims to promote and support the continued use of the COBOL language globally. One of its first missions: To identify the COBOL market, challenges, concerns and how companies are addressing these issues. 
As a first step, The COBOL Working Group is partnering with The Linux Foundation Research team and the Linux Foundation Training & Certification team on a new COBOL research study. The research will seek to explore how organizations’ usage of COBOL has evolved, what use cases, strategies and attitudes are prevalent now and what the future holds for the language.Hosts Alan Shimel and John Mertic are joined by Cameron Seay (E. Caroline Univ.), Misty Decker (Micro Focus) and Magie Hall (Vienna University) to provide more details about the milestones they’ve achieved , the new research study and more.

What do AlmaLinux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Red Hat, Rocky Linux, SUSE and Ubuntu have in common? They are all Linux distributions, sure, but wait–there’s more! Now, thanks to Open Mainframe Project’s Linux Distributions Working Group, they all work closely together toward a common goal: To oversee the health and maintenance of the s390x port of various Linux distributions to ensure that the s390x remains a supported mainframe architecture for them all. The working group will collaborate on major concerns and achievements that the distributions share with respect to the s390x mainframe architecture and work together to support new contributors and make sure they have everything they need to continue building on, supporting and maintaining this important infrastructure.

Last month at Open Mainframe Summit, Open Mainframe Project announced the availability of a z15 Mainframe system dedicated for training next-generation talent and developing new open software technologies to further strengthen the integration of mainframe and cloud. Donated by Broadcom Mainframe Software Division, the z15 will be available for use by all Open Mainframe Projects and the open source community at large beginning in 2023. Broadcom’s donation provides a critical, new resource to foster greater collaboration and the development of new tool sets across the mainframe community.
Rick Perret (Broadcom), Yvette LaMar (IBM Z), and Reg Harbeck (IBM Z) join hosts Alan Shimel and John Mertic to discuss what this means to the Open Mainframe community, the education landscape, and the skills gap.