IBM has deep roots in the open source space and has been backing emerging open source communities from a very early stage — including the Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Eclipse Foundation. This encompasses years of contributions to the development of open source software, licenses, advocating for open governance, and open standards in addition to being an active contributor to many projects.
As open source software continues to gain momentum, we see growth reflected across the different hardware and processor architectures. The processor architecture for IBM Z and LinuxONE is known as s390x.
Open source is not new to IBM Z, Linux has been used for more than 20 years. One of IBM’s key contributions to open source Linux has always been enhancements that take advantage of the unique capabilities of the IBM Z and LinuxONE.
IBM Open Source Program
At IBM, we invest directly in open source software. Today, together with Red Hat we are one of the top 3 companies in the world with the most active number of open source contributors.
We train our employees in the best practices for engaging in open source communities and the importance of open governance. IBM empowers employees to create and contribute to open source projects that solve business, personal and world problems from climate change to social injustice.
IBM has hundreds of engineers working in open source projects strategic to IBM systems and software commercial offerings. IBM contributes to many open source projects from Linux to compilers, tooling, libraries, and some of the most important open source projects in the industry, for example, Kubernetes, Knative, Kubeflow, Node.js, Hyperledger, OpenJ9, and many more.
IBM Open Source Program for IBM Z and LinuxONE
In 2015, before the launch of IBM LinuxONE, IBM built a team of developers with the sole purpose of working with open source communities and to port and/or validate commonly used open source software to the s390x processor architecture. We now reached hundreds of open source packages versions that this team has validated and maintained collaborating with communities. This has grown the availability of the open source software across platforms including s390x.
If the open source community for a project does not include binaries for s390x, our team can publishes instructions so users can do their own builds.
With the newly created role of Open Source Program Manager, a renovated program was established to focus exclusively on open source software for the IBM Z and LinuxONE platform. The following images describe the mission, vision, and overall goal for this program.
If you are working with open source software on either Linux or z/OS please get in touch, we want to share and promote your work with our community.