All Things Open will be hosted on October 15-17 in Raleigh, North Carolina. ATO is an educational conference where attendees learn about new technologies and topics, and it’s always been that way. The goal is for attendees to leave having learned something or been made aware of something new.
Open Mainframe Project will be featured in the event in this session:
2:45 – 3:30 pm: Linux Distribution Collaboration …on a Mainframe! – Elizabeth Joseph, Global Head, Open Source Program Office for IBM zSystems & LinuxONE at IBM
Linux has run on the mainframe architecture (s390x) for over 20 years now, and there’s even Linux-only mainframe hardware! But tight collaboration between the Linux distributions is rather new. Enter the Open Mainframe Project Linux Distributions Working Group, founded in late 2021.
Bringing together various Linux distributions, both corporate-backed and community-driven, representatives from openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, SUSE, and more immediately joined the effort to share bug reports and patches that impact all the distributions. Issues are often shared and discussed on the mailing list, and more complicated topics covered during the monthly meetings. The working group has a number of success stories that will be shared.
Future potential issues are also tackled, and notes shared about upstream changes that may soon impact the package processes. In the latest effort, the team has started thinking about actual upstream projects to invite to our group to be more pro-active about changes that may cause problems on the s390x architecture.
But more importantly, this is a story about community and collaboration. Many people view the various Linux distributions as a competitive space, but like so much of the open source software community, we are all more successful when we share knowledge about our core. The success of this working group, and growing enthusiasm for it from new Linux distributions who are joining, is a great example of this.
All Things Open is not managed by the Linux Foundation or Open Mainframe Project. To register or learn more about the conference, click on the All Things Open conference: https://2023.allthingsopen.org/.
