 Hello and welcome to this talk, creating a sustainable open source ecosystem for mainframe through the open mainframe project. My name is John Merchick, and I'm director of the open mainframe project on behalf of the Linux Foundation. When people ask about open source and mainframe, you get sometimes a really confused look on people's face. How do these things even connect it? How was even the concept of open source and mainframe, I mean, mainframe just seems so disconnected from where all of IT is and the entire open source movement. Well, what's interesting is if you talk to somebody in mainframe and you bring up any technology trend, they will tell you that, oh geez, we did this in mainframe a decade ago or two decades ago. As it turns out, open source is exactly the same. If you look at the roots of the open source movement, they trace all the way back to share in the 1950s and if you think about where they were at the time here, there's a new computer coming from IBM called the IBM Model 704 and a whole group of users trying to understand how this machine works, what are best practices and all of these pieces. Some of the same challenges we have around technology today. They got together in a room in Santa Monica, California and shared code with one of their shared tips and tricks. They shared ideas and this year, we trace back here at the Linux Foundation as the historical root of open source back in 1955 with this user group of share and share is still around today. Share is a biannual event that still happens to this day. It's really interesting. This is just very simple of sharing code. Again, not the same way that we might have done it today. You wouldn't then have the internet to share on, so maybe they'd be sharing physical media, tapes and whatnot, but it's that same concept of collaboration around code. That long heritage from the IBM Model 704 to today of the modern mainframe, it really harkens and talks about the strengths of what this platform is all about, and it's all built around really four key principles. Security, performance, availability, and scalability. If you look at these specs here listed on the screen, that screams that all to you. If you're in the market for a machine that needs all four of those points turned up to an 11, this is the hardware for you, and this hardware is an amazing platform for Linux and open source. Let's look back at how those early meetings, those early gatherings of a user group in 1955 got to where we're at today, and if you move forward 20 years, all of a sudden the share user group was having all sorts of amendment, all sorts of code developed, and the biggest challenge was how to chronicle all this together. As opposed to having just bespoke collaboration, how can we all bring this into something canonical to share? Well, a project called CBT Tape and CBT State, CBT stands for Connecticut Bacon Trust, which is a bank that has been defunct for many, many years. There is mainframe programmers at that bank that saw the value in pulling this together and having a canonical distribution of all of these scripts that have been put together during these share events and elsewhere in the community. Since 1975 have been releasing this volume of all of these things out to the community to use. At the time it was on tape, over time it became on other mediums and even you can download it right from the internet itself and right from their website. And we're at the open mainframe project are really privileged that that project actually came to the open mainframe project earlier this year, and we now host this effort from this great community that has been working with this and really shepherding this for decades now and we're happy to be the home of that going forward. We fast forward a few decades, late 90s, we know Linux was coming on the scene and Linux itself was ported to the S390X platform which is sort of the architecture indicator for the mainframe platform. And it was done by many folks in the community. There was a community of efforts, there was work from Marist University, the IBM Germany offices and other folks out there and it all culminates Linux being supported on this platform. And then as we get into the early 2000s, we see SUSE stepping forward as really the first major Linux distribution to support the S390X architecture along with Red Hat and Debian and many others to follow from there. And as Linux came to this platform just as when Linux has came to so many other places it begins to thrive. 2006, 1700 customers already using in production and in 2013, we already see the open source ecosystem hitting a very critical mass already. So the interesting thing here is what we see is open source is not slowing down anytime soon. And what the true challenge ahead of us here is sort of understanding why that is. And for a mainframe world that is thinking of such applications as very proprietary when they back look into some of their code they're realizing well there's a lot of open source in here and we sometimes call this the code club sandwich where you see a layer of open source which is sort of that underlying framework that powers your application and then that layer of business logic, that magic of the value of what this application is and then open source code as libraries is the ones that do all the interconnections and the other points that are just required for an application to function where if you put all that together open source code is roughly 90% of an application. So with this in mind, you can see that open source isn't slowing down anytime soon. There's nothing but frameworks, there's nothing but libraries to connect pieces in there and it's enabling so much innovation to happen. The real challenge becomes which projects matter and the truth is all projects matter to some degree but there's certain projects that have a huge amount of value to our society to move forward. And the answer for that always is projects with sustainable ecosystems. And we at the open mainframe project believe that the successful projects always depend on members, developers and standards and all those infrastructure, really the top portion of that circle to be successful and the way that these become successful is by them turning into products whether that be internal usage with an organization or a vendor taking it to market either way that's driving an economic benefit in the form of lower R&D costs, more addressable market, faster time to market and that economic benefit is driven back in the project with that circle and that's what we call a sustainable ecosystem. And that circle continues indefinitely and that's really what the definition of sustainability is. It's the property of systems to remain diverse and productive indefinitely. How can we ensure these technologies maintain for a long period of time? Which if you think about that's the mainframe in general. It's a technology in around for decades and our challenge here at the open mainframe project is how do we make that a sustainable thing because already so much of the world depends upon this technology. Now, if we roll back five years ago when the open mainframe project was founded in 2015, you know, we took a little bit of a look at the lay of the land of open source in the mainframe and this pyramid kind of represents a lot of ecosystems we look at of really where the challenges and it's never that open source isn't there but it's running into challenges to get to that next level. Could be something as simple as just fragmentation of the market in these various applications and projects just don't interoperate with one another very well. Could be the challenges of governance. How do you get involved in a project? How do you attain committer access? How do you help set the direction of where it's going? Maybe the project itself is not really focused on building an ecosystem but it's a little bit too specific in its needs and maybe has a premium model or something attached with it. And then you start to get to these higher level functions within a project but are really, really critical ones to grow. Who's managing the assets? Is it one company that maybe at some point could say you don't want to change the license terms or is it held in something very neutral? And when we start to see that come into play as the question, you know, projects can tend to grow pretty well, you know with a degree of fragmentation if the topic is interesting enough and if the topic is really solving enough of a problem but it hits that glass ceiling of organizations willing to continue to invest and bank their business on this project because they don't know where this project could potentially go. They don't know where the assets of this project and is it a safe one to depend upon? And this is really where a project and an effort like the open mainframe project comes into being. And it came out to be five years ago and was launched at LinuxCon Seattle along with a number of other IBM announcements around really bringing open source more broadly to the mainframe. And it included a code donation from IBM of the anomaly detection for engine for Linux logs projects, which is part of which was a part of a IBM product called ZEAware and is a part of our first hosted project here. If we move forward into 2016 we started a mentorship program which brought students' excitement to the mainframe and contributing and porting various open source tooling and contributing to open source projects. And we'll talk more about that in the future here. Two years ago was the launch of Zoey which was a revolution to the ZOS operating system. It was the first ever open source project launched specifically on ZOS and has enabled the modernization of that side of the platform. And when you have such a huge project like that that gets launched, the effects of that start to get felt downstream. And all of a sudden, we saw it last year with a doubling of our hosted projects focusing on areas such as ZVM, other areas of DevOps, ZOSMF. And then in 2020, we've just continued that to grow with even a greater focus on technologies like COBOL and education and other areas of really helping expand the footprint of the mainframe. So the open mainframe project, the mission here is building a community and adoption of open source in the mainframe. And it's done three different ways, eliminating the barriers to that adoption, demonstrating the value of the mainframe. And what I think is really always the most important thing for any open source foundation is strengthening those collaboration points because that collaboration is what drives those other two pieces and drives that larger community. And eliminating barriers is just a multifaceted piece from not only becoming that central focal point, but also showcasing ways that engagement can happen around getting involved in the mainframe. The value of showcasing the business and technical case studies and thought leadership and helping champion some of those solutions. And on the collaboration points of using the hosted projects, which we'll talk about in other projects out there to build engagement and other collaboration and the tools and resources to make this happen. The open mainframe project currently hosts 16 projects from all sort of areas and functions of the mainframe world. And you can learn a little bit more about them at openmainframeproject.org slash projects. In addition, we track a larger scheme of open source in the mainframe in general. And if you go to L.openmainframeproject.org, you can check out the landscape of open source on the mainframe complete from the projects that are very specific to open source in the mainframe, along with the broad Zoey conformance ecosystem and applications that are being driven in that space. In addition, we also track broad open source projects that are supporting the mainframe as well. All of these are great assets and all of these are great ways to understand how the impact of open source on mainframe is. So let's talk a little bit about some of these projects more from an aspect of the challenges and the impacts that we were looking to focus on. So let's start with Zoey. We talked about that. You've probably heard about Zoey a couple of times. The challenges that the ZOS operating system was facing is it wasn't a very modern system from an integration standpoint. Oftentimes many of the main interactions as ZOS were using a 3270 terminal. And that was a huge challenge, not only just from a technical aspect of integrating with other parts of the organization, but also a talent aspect where it was really hard to bring modern development tools into here. And because of that newer generations of developers were just not looking at Zoey as a target. In 2018, as we talked about open mainframe project added Zoey into this ecosystem here. And since then things have began to thrive. In 2019, it reached its 1.0 release and it launched a conformant program to help enable that downstream ecosystem to exist. And over time, there's been continuous investments on collaboration, ecosystem development and infrastructure to help make this project successful. As we sit today, over 20,000 commits and 200 committers all time have made an impact on the Zoey project and significant mind share in the DevOps world has grown of the mainframe because of Zoey of helping connect those pieces. We also are proud to see over 20 Zoey conformant offerings in the market right now. And that's a growing number from five different organizations. So ZVM, as many people may be familiar with your familiar with the mainframe is the hypervisor that is very native to the mainframe. And if you think of a hypervisor, if you think of something like KVM is a very much equivalent ZVM is very specific to this architecture and has been a part of that architecture for decades now. And because it's been a part of that mainframe shops have standardized on it. That's the tooling they use. It's very robust, it's very secure a lot of efforts been putting into it. But as organizations were looking to more cloud enabled their deployment strategies ZVM didn't have the right connections to make that happen. Now there were some efforts put together to make that happen. But it just never really worked as well and it wasn't as seamless as a customer would like. And so IBM took it upon themselves. They said we're gonna rewrite pieces of this but they were even running into a problem of how to develop and grow this out more because being an IBM only project it really made it hard to get broader collaboration. In addition, technologies such as OpenStack and others that were depending that were leveraging a tooling like this and to being held back on the platform. In 2019, Failong became an open mainframe project and Failong was the code that came from a product and a project inside of IBM called the ZVM cloud connector. Now the interesting piece here is IBM looking to drive and getting more people involved in this project. They strategically saw that the co-chairs of the technical steering committee that's the leadership of this project are actually two non IBMers, one from SUSE and one from Velocity Software. And that really made a big signal to the market that there's a community approach needed to help drive this forward. And their big focus and they've got it up and going is an open CI and CD infrastructure to enable more people to be able to try this code out and use it, test it and provide feedback. And as we sit in 2020, we're already seeing more organizations engaging there's a list there of the columns that might come, Infinity, ICOIT in addition to IBM and more innovations and integrations are starting to happen in the community. They're finding their way upstream, making this sort of the hub of that collaboration around ZVM and cloud stack technologies. You might have heard some of the challenges here in the United States in the early days of the COVID crisis on the impact of many of our state and local government systems in the heavy response and tax on those systems due to record unemployment requests. Many of those systems were driven from a mainframe. Many of those systems were written in COBOL. And there was a huge challenge that was raised of what can be done to help modernize these systems, support for helping drive future functionality. Many systems have been under invested in and a lot of the challenge was pointed to of a lack of COBOL talent. Well, the open mainframe community came together and it said, well, look, not only do we wanna make sure the talent gap is solved, but we also wanna enable the next generation of talent to grow from here. And there was two big areas that the project innovated. One, to help that next generation is it launched an open source COBOL programming course. And so this is a COBOL programming course that's fully available as open source. IBM's provide some infrastructure for running some of the labs if you need it. But otherwise you can take it, you can download it. We've even seen people integrated into their own training materials as well for people getting up to speed on COBOL. And this is not just COBOL based on a green screen. This is COBOL using VS code and Eclipse chain and other modern tooling. And second, the project created a collaboration forum and a COBOL talent availability forum that was helping locate and bring all of this talent out here that was available to volunteer or hire work to be able to showcase that their availability. And within a week of both of these being launched, which was really about a week after this really started to hit the critical mass and all of the calls from many of the state and local governments from COBOL talent really started to hit the media. Both of these areas here were already starting to see huge growth. To date, over 1,700 individuals have made themselves available in the calling all COBOL programmers forum. Most of those made themselves available within the coming weeks after that announcement. And the COBOL programming course has over 1,700 stars on GitHub and over 300 forks. And we had over 1,000 stars by the time that the code actually fully made it up onto the GitHub repository. That's how much excitement has happened around that. A huge innovation of bringing that community together. And thinking of that next generation, we talked a little bit about the mentorship program. And again, this was one of the first things that the project kicked off. And it was with the eye of how do we help enable that next generation? Because we realize that there's a huge amount of tenured mainframe talent that's at the back end of their career. And how can we enable that next generation to get involved? And furthermore, there was also a challenge of students just not knowing that there was opportunities within mainframe. And there was already that interest in open source. How could the two be married together? 2016, the first mentorship program was launched with seven mentees. And it has connected so many students in the broad open source community together but also making those impacts upstream. And additionally, it's been brought into university programs with VCU and Western University of Ontario participating. To date, we've seen over 40 mentees completed the program with broader classwork programs reaching another 100 students or more. And this upstream work has been super impactful. It's ported Alpine Linux to the platform. It's included contributions to Hyperledger, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and more. And these mentees are continuing on in industry and they're being employed in mainframe roles and a number of the vendors and clients in the space. Huge area if we'd seen success. So as you can see, mainframe innovation, it thrives here. And we as a project, we provide that infrastructure and we provide that space and the staff to help support it. And that helps drive these natural collaboration opportunities. And you can learn more about how all this works on our project's life cycle page. But it's more than just supporting open source projects that we host. But how can we go beyond our hosted projects? One area has been through our supported projects program which this has been an avenue for supporting broad open source projects that need to support this architecture with infrastructure development support, market awareness and as needed governance and IP home. This has been something that has been ongoing well before the open mainframe project launched with back in the days of the open source development labs. And we've carried it forward and grown this program here. And you can see below some of the open source projects that have been impacted by this work. It's a keen area here as we wanna make sure that people understand really what a mainframe or is somebody who's spent their career in this space. And with that, we've launched a monthly podcast that highlights the diversity in mainframe. So not just a singular view of who mainframe or is but people from young old different nationalities, different genders, different backgrounds and talking about why they decided to have a career in mainframe and what they view the technology and career field is like. You can check this out on any of the various podcast clients out there, Apple podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, Anker and you can also read about it more on our website. There's some great interviews we had Ross Mori from IBM interviewed a few months ago and we've had a lot of other students, other people who have been professionals in this space and people new into their career. It's really been a great mix of folks and so I highly encourage you to check it out. And we've been really successful of bringing together that larger conversation and opportunities around the mainframe. We just had our first annual summit back in September and we're looking to do again next year. You can look at all the recordings for that event and check them out there on our YouTube site. We have a community forums and this is where we've drawn a lot of conversation around COBOL along with Zoe and many other technical topics and you can check that out. And we have a Slack channel where you can connect directly with members of our community as well. So looking at it a glance here in five years nearly 40 organizations, 16 projects, 40 mentees, 300 project contributors and 30,000 project contributions from across a vast aspect of the mainframe world. It's been a really huge and amazing effort. You can participate in the open mainframe project in a number of different ways. Our community is open to anybody to participate in. We are at events both virtually as this one here but when we get back in person we'll be also back in in person events. We have 16 hosted projects and working groups take a part of them and we also host projects as well. So if you have something that is interesting and open source project that benefits the mainframe we talk with us, we'd love to host it. And if you're an organization where having a open source and mainframe ecosystem thriving is of great value to you you can show stewardship in the community through corporate sponsorship. You can learn more about the open mainframe project by heading to openmainframeproject.org you can check out any of our projects openmainframeproject.org slash projects. If you wanna become a member from a corporation or academic or associate aspect you can learn on our website there or email us at the email below and you can obviously fill out the membership application form if you'd like directly. It was that, I wanna thank you so much for your time today. I hope this talk has been very helpful for you of understanding what the open mainframe project is about and I hope you enjoy the rest of this event. Thank you.