Open Mainframe Project

John Mertic, Linux Foundation (JM)

Berthold Gunreben, SUSE (BG) *

Phil Tully, ADP (PT) *

Scott Fagen, CA (SF) *

Marcel Mitran, IBM (MM)

Anuja Deedwaniya, IBM (AD)

Mike Friesenegger, SUSE (MF)

Cameron Seay, NC A&T State University (CS)

Joe Aho, Compuware (JA)

John Jones, ECU (JJ)

Larry Strickland, DataKinetics (LS)

Glenn Everitt, Compuware (GE)

Len Santalucia, Vicom (LS)

Galina Gorelik, IBM (GG)

Alan Warhurst, BMC (AW)

(voting members denoted by asterisks)

Mr. Mertic opened the meeting at 12:21pm, welcoming the larger audience invited to help drive more technical direction and discussion within the TSC. Mr. Mertic presented the following agenda for the meeting:

- Welcome

- Review of Internship proposal

- Presentation by Anuja of IBM of the proposed code contribution.

- Review of other TSC proposed projects.

Mr. Tully asked the group if they were opening to changing the starting time of the meeting to 1:00pm ET for future meetings, helping him accommodate another meeting that also falls at the same time. Mr. Santalucia, Mr. Mitran, Mr. Fagen agreed with the change. Mr. Mertic took an action item to change the re-occurring meeting invite and cancel the meeting scheduled for December 24^th^, 2015.

Internship Program Proposal

Mr. Mertic then discussed the internship program proposal, circulated with the group via email prior to the meeting. Mr. Gunreben said he briefly looked at the summer internship program proposal, but needs more time to review it. Mr. Tully expressed concern that students could pick projects that the TSC may not be focused on. Mr. Mertic replied that typically students will choose projects on the “Project Ideas” list, but leaving it open for new ideas often helped with engagement. Mr. Mertic explained that the proposal review process allows the Open Mainframe Project to work with the students proposing internship projects to ensure it is something that interests the students and is in the best interest of the project.

Mr. Mertic then indicated that we need to have the plan completed and ready to present to the Governing Board in January. Mr. Mertic indicated that in addition to this proposal being completed, the following items need addressed.

  • An administrator to run the program.

  • Mentors identified that can work with the interns ( 1 to 1 ratio of mentors to interns ),

  • A list of project ideas for the students to draw from.

Mr. Fagen asked about the type of person that would be good for a mentorship role. Mr. Mertic indicated that this would be someone technical who could guide the intern to ensure they could complete the project. Mr. Tully asked if the mentor must be on the TSC, to which Mr. Mertic said that they can be from anywhere in the member company’s organization.

Review of proposed IBM code contribution

Mr. Mertic introduced Ms. Deedwaniya to provide an overview of the announced code contribution made at LinuxCON in August to the Open Mainframe Project, for the TSC to review.

Ms. Deedwaniya reviewed a deck outlining the contribution, which is the zAware Log Analytics tool. Mr. Mertic indicated that acceptance of this code contribution will require a waiver approval from the Governing Board first, as it is under a GPLv3 license while the charter requires all non-kernel contributions to be licensed under the Apache license. Ms. Deedwaniya indicated that the intention was to align the acceptance of the code contribution alongside other LinuxONE announcements at IBM Interconnect in February.

Mr. Aho asked about the size of the code base; Ms. Deedwaniya was unsure and said she would check and get back to the group with an update. Mr. Aho further asked about the current state of the code; Ms. Deedwaniya said that there is some testing and validation work to be done, along with the completion of the internal IBM processes for code contributions.

Mr. Everitt asked if IBM was going to retain copyright ownership of the codebase, or if that would be given to the Open Mainframe Project as well. Ms. Deedwaniya said there needs to be clarification on that. Ms. Deedwaniya asked if there were considerations for giving the copyright to the Open Mainframe Project versus IBM retaining this. Mr. Everitt said it helps guide the license used for the code. Ms. Deedwaniya said they were reviewing the copyright contribution still.

Mr. Mertic indicated that next steps were for the TSC to review this contribution, and discuss it in more depth at the January 7^th^, 2016 TSC meeting.

Review of TSC proposed projects

Mr. Mertic asked Mr. Mitran to walk through proposed projects listed on the wiki, as shown below.

  1. develop a JIT for OpenJDK - multiplicative effect of enabling a lot of other projects that depend on OpenJDK

  2. build up the docker-hub content for Linux on z (ClefOS, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu… )

  3. enhance Docker to exploit LoZ capabilities/scale

  4. Open Banking Project (https://openbankproject.com/)

  5. Open Managed Runtime project - python and/or Ruby acceleration (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOnyJurioyw)

  6. Blockchain performance (https://www.ethereum.org/)

  7. Develop a reference micro-service architecture on LoZ

  8. NetFlix services running on LinuxONE (http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/11/pivotal-cloud-foundry-netflix)

  9. Port Walmart's OneOps PaaS to Linux on z (http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/10/15/walmart-open-sources-its-internal-paas-to-stick-it-to-amazon/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/14/walmartlabs-acquires-cloud-computing-startup-oneops-delicious-founders-tasty-labs/)

After Mr. Mitran reviewed the above list, Mr. Fagen indicated that he added another item on the list during Mr. Mitran’s presentation.

  1. Assess and certify(?) popular Linux monitoring tools for z Systems (e.g. http://www.infoworld.com/article/2683857/network-monitoring/article.html, https://blog.serverdensity.com/80-linux-monitoring-tools-know/)

Mr. Seay asked about integration of these project with the internship program. Mr. Mitran said this one way to do this, not per say the only way. Mr. Mitran said he would like to see within working going on in each other’s organizations, as well as engage with other communities to work together.

Mr. Mertic mentioned that with focus on containerization and Docker amongst the items above, we might want to consider engaging the Open Container Project. Mr. Tully advised the group that this is the first true list the group pulled together, and should spend sometime scoping out these items in more detail. Mr. Tully further said that focusing on Docker would be good for ADP specifically.

Mr. Mitran agreed with Mr. Tully that the TSC needs to whittle down and scope out the list a bit more. Mr. Mertic said that he could open the tsc@ mailing list to all technical interested parties, which could help with getting the larger group engaged. All in attendance agreed.

Mr. Mitran said a dependency for Docker support is having an OpenSUSE distro image to use for Docker, as right now ClefOS is only current option and not ideal.

Mr. Tully mentioned that there was discussion about an OpenSUSE distro at the last TSC meeting. Mr. Gunreben said he followed up internally at SUSE after the last meeting, and reported that there was no issue in principle in providing an OpenSUSE distro for System Z, but the challenge is that they don’t have a mainframe powerful enough to compile. Mr. Gunreben said would look to package a subset of packages for the time being, but long term need to partner with another organization for the infrastructure. Mr. Mitran asked if LinuxOne would help, Mr. Gunreben said it would. Mr. Mitran asked for next steps, Mr. Gunreben said he needed build power. Mr. Tully said he had capacity, but can’t get Mr. Gunreben access. Mr. Seay said he has some boxes, not sure if he has what Mr. Gunreben needs. Mr. Seay also indicated that Syracuse University does have boxes potentially, or perhaps IBM might have some other academic project boxes available for use. Mr. Gunreben said he would look into these options and report back to the group at the next meeting.

The next meeting of the TSC was scheduled for January 7^th^, 2016 at 1:00pm Eastern Time.

Mr. Mertic closed the meeting at 1:16pm Eastern Time.