Open Mainframe Mini Summit

### Overview The Open Mainframe Project (OMP) Mini Summit, hosted by John Mertic (Director of OMP at The Linux Foundation), showcases the expanding open-source ecosystem running on mainframe architectures like IBM Z and z/OS. The summit highlights project governance, community sustainability, modern developer tooling, data processing, educational initiatives, and diversity and inclusion across the enterprise computing landscape.

### Key Topics - **Open Mainframe Project & Ecosystem Sustainability:** Len Santalucia (Governing Board Chair and CTO of Vicom Infinity) outlines the history and mission of OMP under The Linux Foundation. Emphasizing sustainability, vendor-neutral hosting, and infrastructure support, Santalucia highlights the platform's evolution from the System/360 to the IBM z15 and notes that OMP hosts 15 projects with 38 supporting organizations. - **COBOL Resurgence and Modernization:** Derek Britton (Micro Focus, COBOL Working Group) and Sudharsana Srinivasan (IBM, COBOL Training Course) address the vital role of COBOL in core global business systems, dispelling misconceptions about aging codebases during the COVID-19 pandemic. They describe the formation of the COBOL Working Group and the launch of the open-source COBOL training course on GitHub, which uses modern interfaces such as VS Code, Zowe, and IBM Z Open Editor. - **Zowe Architecture and Conformance:** Michael DuBois (Broadcom) presents Zowe, an open-source extensible framework developed jointly by Broadcom, IBM, and Rocket Software to bridge mainframe services with modern engineering workflows. He covers its core components, Long Term Support (LTS) lifecycle, and the vendor conformance badging program. - **New Projects (Geneva ERS & Software Discovery Tool):** Kip Twitchell introduces Geneva ERS, a high-performance single-pass reporting and scanning engine designed for massive transactional data processing on z/OS. Elizabeth Joseph introduces the Software Discovery Tool, a Python/Flask utility designed to provide a searchable index of open-source packages across Linux distributions (SUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu) and z/OS. - **Mainframe Open Education:** Lauren Valenti (Broadcom) discusses an industry-wide collaborative effort to build community-sourced learning paths and educational content to replenish mainframe skills and onboard new engineers. - **Diversity and Inclusion Panel:** Moderated by Rick Perret (Broadcom), a panel featuring Silva Versacova (Broadcom), Rashmi Agrawal (Rocket Software), and Jen Francis (IBM) explores non-traditional career paths, equitable hiring practices, community mentorship, and overcoming barriers in open source and mainframe technology.

### Technical Details - **Zowe Components:** Zowe features an API Mediation Layer (consisting of an API Gateway, Discovery Service, and API Catalog providing SSO and MFA support), a Command Line Interface (CLI) supporting plug-ins (e.g., Db2, CICS, Endevor), Zowe Explorer (a VS Code extension for datasets, USS files, and jobs), and a Web UI virtual desktop application framework. Incubation projects include client-side SDKs (Node.js, Python, Swift) and Zowe Mobile. - **Zowe LTS & Packaging:** Software delivery is standardized via SMP/E installation packages and PTF maintenance streams, providing a two-year stable LTS release window without breaking API changes. - **Geneva ERS Processing Engine:** Generates machine code on the fly to execute millions of joins and multi-query batch scans across sequential and VSAM files in a single pass, enabling detailed financial postings and analytical reporting during off-peak system utilization. - **Open COBOL Courseware:** The training repository features structured modular tracks, hands-on lab environments on IBM-hosted systems (issuing over 3,500 system IDs), and integrations with Db2 APIs.

### Takeaways The mainframe ecosystem is actively adopting cloud-native developer paradigms, REST APIs, Git bridges, and modern integrated development environments to eliminate platform silos. Sustained open collaboration across major enterprise vendors, standardized education, and proactive inclusion initiatives are key to maintaining critical global infrastructure while enabling a new generation of engineers.