Picture In A Mainframe

Jonni Bidwell wants to know if he could install Linux on the mainframe at Future Towers. The Open Mainframe Project’s John Mertic has all the answers.

John Mertic is Director of Program Management for the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project (www.openmainframeproject.org), an effort to bring open source knowledge, and of course Linux, to mainframe computing. You may be forgiven for thinking mainframe machines were all clunky relics running obscure COBOL code, but the modern mainframe is a thing of technical beauty. While the cloud offers elasticity, portability and spares you the woes of managing your own infrastructure, mainframe(s) offer resilience, security and performance.

The project uses Zowe, the first open source software to run on IBM’s z/OS – and yes, you can now run Ubuntu on your mainframe. Besides being a mainframe man, John is also Program Manager for a number of other Linux Foundation projects, including: Open Data Platform (www.odpi.org), a non-profit dedicated to standardising the big data ecosystem; the R Consortium; and the Academy Software Foundation (www.aswf.io), whose goal is to further the role of open source software in creative industries. He was good enough to spend some time chatting to us at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit back in October 2018.

Linux format: Mainframes always seem inaccessible to the lay person. They’re bulky and expensive and it seems like they can only be operated by people with crazy hair (shouldn’t throw stones?–Ed) in white coats. Is this changing?

John mertic: A couple of years ago there was a student who bought a mainframe off eBay. He had it in his parents’ basement1 and he figured out how to get all the software and everything running on it. The mainframe community was blown away – he got to bring it to conferences and everything. I think IBM helped give him a bunch of missing pieces that he needed; I think he works for IBM now.