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State of the Open Mainframe 2021

By
Linux.com Editorial Staff
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By John Mertic and Maemalynn Meanor

The mainframe is a foundational technology that has powered industries for decades, including government, financial, healthcare, and transportation. With the help of surrounding communities, the technologies built around this platform have paved the way for the emergence of a new set of technologies we see deployed today. Notably, a significant number of mainframe technologies are profoundly embracing open source.

The genesis of the open mainframe community

The mainframe has a tradition of having an open user community going back to SHARE in the 1950s. A group of mainframe technologists came together in Los Angeles, California, to share tips, insights, and, yes, code for the newly released IBM 701 computer system. SHARE was very likely the first open source software community.

See Below: Open Mainframe Summit Playlist (35 videos) 

Over the years, this user group met regularly to share and collaborate on using the IBM 701 and subsequent systems. The “code” that came together was freely shared between mainframe operators and developers. As the years passed, it was quickly realized that there was a need to curate this code into a repository that others in the industry could use. 

Arnie Casinghino, Circa 2011

Arnold “Arnie” Casinghino was one of the first to recognize the need to collaborate. In 1975, he began to curate scripts and tools into the CBT Tape project (CBT standing for the name of Arnie’s then-employer, the now-defunct Connecticut Bank and Trust Company). Interested users at that time would send Arnie a letter with a few dollars to request a tape, a method of distribution that carries on to today even though most users download the latest release from their website.

Casinghino’s vision culminated into a project that continues today and is now hosted at the Open Mainframe Project under the leadership of Sam Golab.

Linux comes to the mainframe

As Linux began to take the world by storm in the 1990s, a small group of mainframe enthusiasts started experimenting with Linux on IBM System 390 (a previously current generation of mainframe hardware). Over the last 20 years, others like Hitachi and Fujitsu also invested in enabling open source and Linux on their mainframe platforms. Linux on mainframe marked its official start on December 18, 1999, with IBM publishing a collection of patches and additions to the Linux 2.2.13 kernel. 

The year 2000 brought momentum to Linux on the mainframe. The first true “Linux distribution” for these systems came in early 2000 as a collaboration between Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Think Blue Linux by Millenux in Germany. By October of that year, SUSE became the first vendor-supported Linux Distribution, in the first release of what’s now known as SUSE Enterprise Linux. SUSE’s first s390x distro represented an early example of mainframe leading the way in the evolution of computing technology.

Today, nine known Linux distributions currently provide an s390x architecture variant.

Source: https://landscape.openmainframeproject.org/open-source?zoom=200

The expansion of the mainframe as a platform for Linux continues to be nurtured in the Open Mainframe Project, with key projects outlined below helping Linux on the mainframe continue to be a platform used by Fortune 100 companies worldwide.

  • Feilong, which provides an interface between z/VM (the primary hypervisor for mainframe, is directly based on technology and concepts dating back to the 1960s) and modern cloud stack systems such as OpenStack, is jointly developed by IBM, SUSE, and others.
  • Tessia is a tool that automates and simplifies the installation, configuration, and testing of Linux systems running on the Z platform.

Developments in COBOL 

COBOL, which stands for “Common Business-Oriented Language,” is a compiled, English-like computer programming language developed for use as a business applications language. Its roots go back to the 1950s, and COBOL is still frequently used in many industries for key applications.

The COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020 put high levels of stress on various government services due to the unprecedented number of unemployment applications and other similar needs. This put the spotlight on COBOL, as it was then the predominant technology used for these systems. This also highlighted the perceived lack of talent to support these systems, which have code going back to the 1960s. 

The vast COBOL and mainframe communities quickly addressed this need and made several efforts to provide a sustainable home for COBOL.

  • Calling all COBOL Programmers Forum – an Open Mainframe Project forum where developers and programmers who would like to volunteer can post their profiles or are available for hire. Whether they are actively looking for employment, retired skilled veterans looking to stay involved, students who have completed COBOL courses, or are professionals wanting to volunteer, the forum offers the opportunity for job seekers to specify their level of expertise and availability to assist. Employers can then connect with these individuals as needed. 
  • COBOL Technical Forum – a new forum created specifically to address COBOL technical questions in which experienced COBOL programmers monitor activity. The forum allows all programmers to quickly learn new techniques and draw from a broad range of community expertise to address common questions and challenges exacerbated during this unprecedented time. 
  • Open Source COBOL Training – the Open Mainframe Project Technical Advisory Council has approved hosting a new open source project that will lead collaborative efforts to create training materials on COBOL. The courseware was contributed by IBM based on its work with clients and institutions for higher education and is provided under an open source license. 

These initiatives were followed by a formal COBOL Working Group established later in 2020 to address the long-term challenges in building a sustainable COBOL ecosystem. 

In early 2021, attention turned to the tooling ecosystem for COBOL developers with the launch of the COBOL Check project. This initiative enables test-driven development (TDD) practices for COBOL by providing a unit testing framework.

Zowe brings together the industry leaders to drive the future development paradigms of the mainframe

Traditionally, organizations have been challenged by integrating mainframe applications and data with the other systems that power their enterprise. This integration task further created a talent development challenge, as the paradigms between mainframe and other enterprise computing systems differed enough to make skills not easily transferable.

Broadcom, IBM, and Rocket Software saw this challenge and independently developed various frameworks to close this gap with the mainframe development experience. These include:

  • An API Mediation Layer for standardizing the API experience for mainframe applications and services
  • A CLI tool that could be run on a developer’s laptop or other non-mainframe systems and used for DevOps tooling integration.
  • A Web Desktop interface to make it easier to develop web-based applications that leverage mainframe services and data using common development toolkits.

These components came together in August 2018 in Zowe, which was the first open source project launched that targeted the z/OS operating system (the predominant operating system on mainframe systems). The intention of bringing this project into the vendor-neutral Open Mainframe Project was to establish Zowe as the dominant development and integration tool for mainframe systems, aligning the mainframe community around Zowe.

After Zowe 1.0 was released in February 2019, the project quickly turned to enable a downstream ecosystem of vendor offerings to flourish by establishing the Zowe Conformance Program in August 2019. To date, there are more than 50 Zowe Conformant offerings from 6 different vendors in the mainframe industry.

In addition, Zowe has brought new projects into its scope, with the following incubator projects as of August 2021:

  • ZEBRA, which provides re-usable and industry compliant JSON formatted RMF/SMF data records so that many other ISV SW and users can exploit them using open-source SW in many ways (contributed by Vicom Infinity).
  • Workflow WiZard helps developers and systems programmers simplify the generation and management of z/OSMF workflows (contributed by BMC).

Zowe boasts more than 300 contributors with more than 34,000 contributions as of August 2021.

Mentorship to support the mainframes of tomorrow

One of the initial initiatives of the Open Mainframe Project was to establish a path to onboard students into the mainframe community, aligning with the current interest in open source development. Additionally, with the growth of open source on the platform, there was a need for maintainers for these projects with mainframe skills.

The Open Mainframe Project launched its first mentorship program in 2016, with seven students making contributions to the open source ecosystem on the mainframe. To date, more than 50 mentees have participated in this program, making important contributions to projects such as:

This summer, the Open Mainframe Project welcomed a record 14 mentees across the globe that had mentors in several projects including a few new ones such as ATOM, COBOL Programming Course, COBOL Working Group, Mainframe Open Education, Polycephaly, Software Discovery Tool, and Zowe. 

The mentorship program has enabled these students to become part of the future mainframe talent, with mentorship graduates now in developer roles at ADP, IBM, SUSE, and others. 

The future is bright for the mainframe

The mainframe has seen a resurgence in the past five years, with the launch of the Open Mainframe Project and the industry coming together in key open source projects in the COBOL, Linux on System Z, and z/OS ecosystems. The Open Mainframe Project hosts more than 20 projects and working groups supported by over 45 organizations as of August 2021, with no signs of slowing anytime soon.

Read more about the Open Mainframe Project in the 2020 annual report, and join us at Open Mainframe Summit on September 22-23, 2021.

The Linux Foundation and Fintech Open Source Foundation Announce Keynote Speakers for Open Source Strategy Forum London 2021

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Experts and industry leaders from financial services, technology and open source will gather for thought-provoking insights and conversations about how to best leverage open source software to solve industry challenges.

SAN FRANCISCO, September 16, 2021 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, along with co-host Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit whose mission is to accelerate adoption of open source software, standards and best practices in financial services, today announced keynote speakers for Open Source Strategy Forum London (OSSF). The event takes place October 5, preceded by a FINOS Member event on October 4, in London, England. The schedule can be viewed here and the keynote speakers can be viewed here. 

OSSF’s goal is to deepen collaboration across finance, open source and technology and drive innovation across the industry in order to deliver better code, faster. The event will feature 35+ sessions, revealing recent developments and the direction of open source in financial services across a wide range of topics and domains.

“We are entering what can only be referred to as the golden age for Open Source in Financial Services”, said Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director, FINOS. “In the last year not only have we seen an exponential growth in contributions from Financial Institutions – something frankly unprecedented – but we are now witnessing the industry coming together to solve long standing business challenges through open collaboration. I am truly excited to have so many leaders at OSSF sharing their vision for an open financial stack, and to be able to bring our community together for a fantastic and unique event like OSSF.”

Keynote speakers this year include:

Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director, FINOSNick Cook, Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships, Alliance for Innovative Regulation (AIR), and former Head of Innovation, UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)Jane Gavronsky, Chief Technology Officer, FINOS, and former Managing Director, Credit SuisseRussell Green, Managing Director, Deutsche Bank AGLiz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer, Isovalent

Conference Session Highlights:

Creating an Open Source Data Standard for Financial Services Regulation – Taniem Choudhury, Deutsche BankAn Open-sourced Solution to Data Governance? How Legend May Be the Answer to Data Quality Concerns in the Financial Industry – Ffion Acland & Beeke-Marie Nelke, Goldman SachsMorphir: A Single Language for Business and Technology – Attila Mihaly, Morgan StanleyPolicy Compliance with Sigstore: From Signing Software to Validating the Whole Software Supply Chain – Axel Simon, Red HatContaining the Chaos While Embracing Kubernetes Based Technology in Finance, Rob Knight, SUSENavigating Open Source Risk: A Strategic Approach – Dawn Foster, VMware 

Attending companies include: Adaptive Financial Consulting Limited, Audace Labs, Avanade, Bitergia, Canonical, Citi Group, Cosaic, Demodyfi, Deutsche Bank, Digital Asset, EPAM Systems, Evolveum, Fidelity Investments, GitHub, GitLab, Goldman Sachs, IHS Markit, ING, International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Itaú Unibanco SA, Large Credit Union Coalition, London Stock Exchange, Morgan Stanley, Nomura Holdings, Point72 Asset Management, Red Hat, Scott Logic, Symphony, TD Securities, Wipro, U.S. Bank, and many more.

Registration is available for 460 GBP. Members of The Linux Foundation receive a 20 percent discount – members can contact events@linuxfoundation.org to request a member discount code. Members of FINOS can attend at no cost – members can contact ossf@finos.org to request the FINOS Member registration code. 

Health and Safety
Attendees will be required to be fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus and wear a mask while onsite at the event. Additionally, all attendees will need to comply with all on-site health measures, in accordance with The Linux Foundation Code of Conduct. To learn more, visit the Health & Safety webpage and read our blog post.

Press
Members of the press who would like to request a press pass to attend should contact Kristin O’Connell.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 2,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation Events are where the world’s leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world’s largest shared technologies.

Visit our website and follow us on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook for all the latest event updates and announcements.

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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Media Contact
Kristin O’Connell
The Linux Foundation
koconnell@linuxfoundation.org

The post The Linux Foundation and Fintech Open Source Foundation Announce Keynote Speakers for Open Source Strategy Forum London 2021 appeared first on Linux Foundation.

3 basic Linux group management commands every sysadmin should know

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Read More at Enable Sysadmin

3 basic Linux user management commands every sysadmin should know

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How to use the useradd, usermod, and userdel commands is essential knowledge for Linux administrators.

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How to manage users and groups in Linux

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User and group management are two must-have skills for every Linux administrator.

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13 resources for learning to write better Bash code

By
Jason Perlow
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13 resources for learning to write better Bash code

Whether you’re new to writing scripts or you’ve been using Bash for years, there’s always something to learn. Boost your scripting skills with these guides, tutorials, and examples.
Jose Vicente Nunez
Tue, 9/14/2021 at 9:49pm

Image

Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay

Learning a scripting language is an intimidating task. It also takes time because practice is the only way to master a skill properly, and you will need to do and redo your code to learn new techniques and fix your mistakes.

Topics:  
Bash  
Scripting  
Education  

Read More at Enable Sysadmin

How to create documents with Bash scripts

By
Jason Perlow
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How to create documents with Bash scripts

Bash “here documents” are a useful way to create uncomplicated YAML and HTML documents, inventory files, and emails.
Jose Vicente Nunez
Tue, 9/14/2021 at 4:57pm

Image

Photo by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels

Sometimes you need to generate multi-line documents with complex nested structures, like YAML or HTML, from inside Bash scripts. You can accomplish this by using some special Bash features, like here documents. A “here doc” is a code or text block that can be redirected to a script or interactive program. Essentially, a Bash script becomes a here doc when it redirects to another command, script, or interactive program.

This article explains how to:

Topics:  
Linux  
Bash  
Command line utilities  

Read More at Enable Sysadmin

Hey syadmins, what device do you update first?

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Are you asked to fix malfunctioning tech whenever you visit a friend or relative’s house? You’re not alone. Vote for what to update first in our poll.

Read More at Enable Sysadmin

Academy Software Foundation giving open communities access to production-grade digital assets for testing, demonstration, and education purposes

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Background

The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a project hosted by The Linux Foundation, provides a neutral forum for open source software developers in the motion picture and broader media industries to share resources and collaborate on image creation, visual effects, animation, and sound technologies. 

It was created in 2018 after the conclusion of an investigation by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) Science and Technology Council holding an 18-month investigation on the state of open source in the industry. This aligned with the need for a vendor-neutral foundation to provide a sustainable home for open source projects that are key to the growth of the industry.

Identifying the need for exemplar assets for community use

As of August 2021, The Academy Software Foundation provides a home for Open Shading Language, OpenColorIO, OpenCue, OpenEXR, OpenTimelineIO, OpenVDB, and MaterialX.

As these projects have progressed in development, there was a need identified to have production-grade digital assets (e.g.,3D scene data, images, image sequences, volumetric data, animation rigs, edit decision lists) available for use in development and testing environments to ensure these projects can scale to the demands of the movie and content creation processes. 

Furthermore, the ASWF identified an additional need to have production-grade assets for general research and learning purposes. 

The ASWF identified two objectives to address these requirements:

Provide a vendor-neutral home for both homing the assets and being a curator for exemplar assets that would align with the industry needs.Create a licensing framework striking a balance between the needs in research, learning, and open source development, with the intellectual property concerns of production-grade assets (as they often come from real productions).

An open community comes together

There was some precedent in the industry, with the 2018 release of the Moana Island Scene by Disney Animation. This sparked several discussions in the industry on how to have a larger set of similar assets available for community use leading to the creation of an Asset Repository Working Group at the Academy Software Foundation in 2020.

The culmination of this working group came in July 2021, with the transition of the working group to a formal project that will establish the infrastructure and governance of the Assets Repository. The intention is for the project to function and work like any other open source project, with full transparency and community participation, to identify and curate exemplar assets. 

At the same time, the legal counsel across Academy Software Foundation members came together to align on the ASWF Digital Assets License, which was created in the spirit of licenses used previously in the industry and designed to specifically ensure these assets can be used for education, learning, research, and open source development. The ASWF Digital Assets License helped create a bridge between producers and consumers of these assets, establishing standardized terms to enable collaboration and the re-use of content in an industry where it had previously been limited.

As of August 2021, there is interest from multiple organizations in contributing assets to this repository as it takes form over the next few months.

Conclusion

The Linux Foundation has been the home for vendor-neutral collaboration in both horizontal technology spaces and vertical markets such as automotive, networking, energy, and here motion pictures. In supporting over 750 open source projects, we are starting to see more and more efforts such as these where the collaboration outside of traditional software development and into educational materials, community development, and standards. The Assets Repository project at the Academy Software Foundation is a great example of the unique collaboration opportunities that open source brings and are driven by our open communities.

The post Academy Software Foundation giving open communities access to production-grade digital assets for testing, demonstration, and education purposes appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Antmicro Doubles Down on Commitment to the Zephyr Project as Community Grows to More Than 1,000 Contributors

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Wind River also advances its commitment to the open source ecosystem by joining the project as a Silver Member

SAN FRANCISCO, September 13, 2021 – On the heels of its 5th anniversary and inaugural Developer Summit, the Zephyr Project today announces a major milestone with more than 1,000 contributors and 55,000 commits. Zephyr, an open source project at the Linux Foundation that builds a safe, secure and flexible real-time operating system (RTOS) for resource-constrained devices, also welcomes Antmicro as a Platinum member and Wind River as a Silver member.

Zephyr RTOS unites companies, developers and end users around the world to ensure balanced collaboration and feedback to evolve and meet the needs of its community. This innovative relationship among stakeholders advances the Zephyr Project’s support of new hardware, developer tools, sensors, and drivers, while maximizing the functionality of devices that run applications developed using the Zephyr OS.

“The number of contributors to an open source project is one of the best measures of its relevance to the open source community,” said Barna Ibrahim, Chair of the Zephyr Project Marketing Group and Strategic Partner Development Lead at Google. “Today’s announcement represents one more step in our open source journey and increased role in the advocacy, use and contribution across the Zephyr ecosystem. Ultimately, this strong ecosystem will help build secure and safe products across the globe.”

Evidence that momentum will continue growing for the project include:

The 1000th contributor – meet Embla Flatlandsmo and learn more about what and why she contributed to the project in this blog and video.Almost 700 people registered for the first-ever Zephyr Developer Summit in June. The event consisted of 5 mini-conferences, 28 sessions and 51 speakers who presented technical content, best practices, real-world use cases and more. Videos are available on the Zephyr Project Youtube Channel.Zephyr is able to automatically generate an Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) during builds with the 2.6 release, so support for ISO/IEC 5962:2021 SBOMs is already included in the second Long Term Support (LTS) release this fall.It is one of the few open source projects that has a CVE Numbering Authority(CNA) and has an active Project Security Incident Response Team(PSIRT) that manages responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities to product makers. Product creators using Zephyr can sign up for free to be notified of vulnerabilities.  Golioth, a recent new member and Zephyr tool provider, received $2.5 million in seed funding and beta testing, which was all based on the RTOS.Seamless integration with Renode (Antmicro’s simulation framework for complex IoT systems), Nanopb (Protocol buffers for embedded systems),  TensorFlow Lite Micro (software library for embedded machine learning) and others.Antmicro released the Open Source M.2 IoT Smart Module with edge ML capabilities based on EdgeTPU and Zephyr RTOS running on Nordic nrf52840 to enable fully open hardware IoT gateways.

Commitment to Zephyr

Today, the Zephyr Project announces that long-time member Antmicro has doubled down on its commitment by upgrading its membership to Platinum. Peter Gielda, CEO of Antmicro, will join the Zephyr Governing Board.

Additionally, Wind River joined the project as a Silver member. Other project member companies include Adafruit, AVSystem, BayLibre, Eclipse Foundation, Facebook, Fiware, Foundries.io, Golioth, Google, Intel, Laird Connectivity, Linaro, Memfault, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, Parasoft, Pat-Eta Electronics, RISC-V, SiFive, Synopsys and teenage engineering, among others.

“We are delighted to welcome Peter Gielda to the Governing Board,” said Joel Stapleton, Chair of the Zephyr Project Governing Board and Principal Engineering Manager at Nordic Semiconductor. “Antmicro has already contributed so much to Zephyr with board support, demos and documentation. We look forward to working more closely with them and strengthening our community.”

“An active member of the project since its early days, Antmicro has been pioneering the use of Zephyr in several fields, including FPGAs and the RISC-V architecture, in both hard and soft implementations,“ said Peter Gielda, CEO at Antmicro and now Member of the Zephyr Project Governing Board. “Building on top of our work combining TensorFlow Lite Micro, Zephyr and Renode for machine learning development we join our customers and partners Google, Intel, NXP and Nordic Semiconductor in a leadership position in Zephyr to strengthen the vendor-neutral RTOS option for the open source hardware, software and AI solutions that we develop.”

“As we move towards an intelligent systems future, it will become increasingly important to collect and process data at the intelligent edge in real time,” said Amar Parmar, Senior Director, Solution Partners at Wind River. “For resource-constrained devices, Zephyr can be at the heart of where this data originates. Zephyr Project has fostered a vibrant and growing community addressing the technical requirements to deploy a new generation of devices, aligned with modern development practices and tooling. As an original contributor to the code base and an active member of the community, we look forward to continued collaboration.”

To learn more about Zephyr RTOS, visit the Zephyr website and blog.

About the Zephyr Project

The Zephyr Project is an open source, scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) supporting multiple hardware architectures. To learn more, please visit www.zephyrproject.org.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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