Open Mainframe Project TAC Meeting - July 14, 2022

Date/Time

Meeting held monthly on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month unless otherwise stated. Agenda to be posted at https://github.com/openmainframeproject/tac/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22meeting%22

All meetings are listed on the Open Mainframe Project calendar at https://lists.openmainframeproject.org/calendar, subject to the mailing lists you are subscribed to.

Conference call details

Meetings are hosted on the LFX Meeting Management platform. More details on how to register are at https://tac.openmainframeproject.org/meetings.

Meeting Recording

A recording of the meeting and the transcript will be both available.

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Attendance

Voting member rollcall:

  • Joe Bostian, IBM ( Platinum Member )
  • Giancarlo Frix, Rocket Software ( Platinum Member )
  • Mark Post, SUSE ( Platinum Member )
  • Sean Grady, Rocket Software ( Zowe )

Not in Attendance

  • vacant, ADP ( Platinum Member )
  • James Caffrey, IBM ( ADE )
  • Sudharsana Srinivasan, IBM ( COBOL Programming Course )
  • Kip Twitchell ( GenevaERS )
  • Gregory MacKinnon, Broadcom ( Platinum Member )

  • Phil Tully, Citi ( Platinum Member )

    Quorum Not Achieved.

Other Attendees

  • Yarille Kilborn- Linux Foundation
  • Nicholas Kocsis
  • Andrea Orth
  • Daniel Horak
  • Mark Post
  • David Edelson
  • Hiren Shah
  • Francesco Giordano

Agenda

Extracted from meeting-agenda labeled issues and pull requests from openmainframeproject/tac prior to the meeting.

## Notes

Ambitus Annual Review- Mr. Bostian presented the annual review for the Ambitus project. He noted success in demonstrating how open source software works with IBM z platforms and strengths in open mainframes. There have been some tools created under Ambitus. He mentioned there hasn’t been much development in the public square for downstream OSS development and challenges that have made it more difficult than anticipated, such as vulnerabilities, security, and attacks. He mentioned taking advantage of things like LFX to help with things like this.

They created a tool that allows for a published Z/OS control box that allows users to go off and write applications that they can easily explore. There’s a Python toolkit for going off and doing various kinds of Z/OS type tasks and interfaces to various components of the system through Python interfaces. In the next year he would like to focus on downstream development and secure best practices.

Mr. Bostian mentioned wanting to get through the open SSL Best Practices badge or certification. Mr. Edelson brought up the Z/OS Open Tools Project. Mr. Bostian thinks Ambitus may be a good fit and would like to set up a meeting with Mike and Mr. Mertic.

Ms. Kilborn will send an email to the voting TAC members for a vote to renew the project at incubator status for another year due.

Participation in Open Source Summit Europe- Dublin- Likely skipping this and hoping the Mini Summit will be a Zowe Day but we are awaiting confirmation.

Reminders on Open Mainframe Summit- Early bird registration runs through 7/15. There is a mentee registration code for virtual attendance that will be sent out- (OMS22MENTEE). A press release with the schedule went out yesterday and there has been some media requests as a result.

Review upcoming annual reviews-Zowe next is on 7/28 followed by GenevaERS on 8/11. The schedule is posted on: https://tac.openmainframeproject.org/process/review_cycle.html

Project updates

Mentorships- A reminder to OMP mentors that the midterm meeting for the Summer Cohort is coming up on July 19th at 7 pm EST. We will want mentee status and will discuss final objectives and OMP conference presentations (in September) by mentees.

Students should prepare a short status report for the midterm meeting. Nothing elaborate. They should include: (1) accomplishments so far, (2) what they are currently working on and have left to do. (3) identify any problems or issues they have encountered, and especially any outstanding issues.

Zowe- Mr. Grady had to leave but left the following notes: “Today we are entering RC generation for v2.2 of zowe. This is notable on the server-side in that it adds a new utility, ‘configmgr’, which reuses our existing codebase in a new and useful way. It can read multiple YAML config files, even YAML config within parmlibs, and can resolve template references within them. it will also cross-reference the values against the config schema, to ensure the user did not make a typo that would affect the zowe run. this utility can be used stand-alone if people wish to script around it, but it is our plan to enhance our existing startup logic to utilize it in existing zowe commands starting in the release after, v2.3

Aside from that, the Program Increment is wrapping up. Squads are considering what they will do in the next PI, and at the beginning of it we want to do a better Innovation Week than ever before. We want anyone interested to present their hackathon-style idea in a public meeting prior to the kickoff event, to get team members that would like to cooperate on doing something zowe-related that’s innovative even if it doesn’t fit with existing goals.

Also, the TSC has approved 2 new documents: One on rules and messaging the zowe community will follow for what is/isn’t a breaking change and how it is communicated in advance. And one on a public document for how zowe community responds to and reports on security vulnerabilities.”

GenevaERS- Ms. Orth updated on the project and mentioned moving the GenevaERS mainframe IBM internal GitHub to the public.

Zorow- Mr. Shah said it is stable and he’s not seeing any additional workflows coming from his ISV’s so they are still working with that community to publish it.