So you thought who uses those larger, dinosaurous computing machines (a.k.a mainframes) these days ? Well, large institutions with massive workloads do, and Linux Foundation just made it even easier for such corporates and institutions to use mainframes for their computing needs — by announcing ‘Open Mainframe Project’.
And yes, as the name suggests, the project is pretty much that. Under this new project, the Linux Foundation is making Mainframes open-source, to help partner companies use mainframe computers, by beginning to build a set of open source tools and technologies for Linux mainframes, while helping one another overcome common development issues in the same manner as all open source projects.
IBM supplies most of these mainframes, and this new venture is hence driven to a large extent, by the very company. In fact, IBM itself announced a new partnership with Canonical today, wherein the two companies are teaming to build one running Ubuntu Linux, the new unit being named as the LinuxOne.
The Linux Foundation, to everyone’s surprise, has been running mainframes for one and a half decade and the use of linux on these mainframes has hence grown substantially. This new project is also a result of that factor, Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation explained in a statement.
Ross Mauri, General manager for IBM Systems said,
The Open Mainframe Project gives these customers, vendors and service providers one place to come together.
IBM, as a part of this initiative and its role of being the big brother in mainframes, is contributing a mssive 250,000 lines of codes already, to this new project.
Initial list of partner companies and institutions for this new project include those, who are already mainframe into the mainframes. These companies/institutes include IBM, BMC, CA Technologies and Marist College, Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT told TechCrunch.
So why this initiative ?
Well. frankly, I am myself not much into mainframes (its like, a work for really really core-tech guys !), but what I can infer from various media sentiments and Linux’s initiative, is the fact that the foundation is looking to attract the current, new generation of developers into core mainframe development work. This is primarily because the current crop of devs, while have been developing super awesome applications and tools, are not really into mainframes (the first line of this post is pretty much an expression to this argument).
However, even though the initiative is good and has some robust backing, only time will tell how devs react to this development. If you are into mainframes, do let me know in the comments, about your thoughts on this new initiative.
IMAGE : WIKIPEDIA // CREATIVE COMMONS
