Bringing a project here

The Open Mainframe Project is a host of open-source projects and open-collaboration working groups to benefit the mainframe ecosystem. Anyone can bring a new project or working group or start a new project or working group at the Open Mainframe Project.

Why host your project at the Open Mainframe Project?

A basic premise behind the Linux Foundation, the Open Mainframe Project, and open source in general, is that most interactions are positive-sum. No fixed amount of investment, mindshare, or development contributions are allocated to specific projects. Just as open source development is based on the idea that we are collectively smarter than one any of us, open source foundations work to make the entire community better off. Equally important, a neutral home for a project and community fosters this positive-sum thinking. It drives growth and diversity, core elements of a successful open-source project.

Organizations and projects come to the Open Mainframe Project to…

Have a vendor-neutral home for the project and assets.

Groundbreaking and game-changing projects are a collective effort across organizations. Hosting at Open Mainframe Project ensures a project has a reputable legal home and governance to attract contributors and adoption.

  • All projects are set up as 501c6 Series LLC legal entities, giving the project a non-profit status and autonomy to set their policies and processes with expert guidance.
  • To ensure neutral management, the project has access to Open Mainframe Project-owned infrastructures such as mailing lists, websites, and domain names.
  • Open Mainframe Project project lifecycle guides the project to establish a sustainable project.

Bring in contributors from different organizations ( including your competitors )

Shared R&D with a broad ecosystem means bringing more contributors and maintainers into your project - including your competitors.

  • Our staff works with the project to establish open, neutral governance that makes roles clear and paths to leadership available.
  • All projects have a Code of Conduct to ensure collaboration in a safe and welcoming environment.
  • Outreach done through the Open Mainframe Project is done from a neutral perspective, separating product promotion and vendor favoritism and promoting the community’s work.

Drive broad industry awareness with the press and analysts.

Your project will get broad motion picture, visual effects, tech, and open source exposure through our large audience, extensive media outreach partnerships with publications such as Linux.com and TFiR, and key partners.

  • Your project will be featured on the Open Mainframe Project and the Linux Foundation websites.
  • Always available guest blog post(s) on the Open Mainframe Project blog on project updates.
  • Post one technical article about an open-source project you care about to Linux.com, which has over 1 million unique visitors per month.
  • As appropriate, support your announcements with social outreach and quotes from Linux Foundation and Open Mainframe Project leadership.
  • Access to opportunities for contributed articles, videos, podcasts, and events

Build a downstream ecosystem for open and commercial solutions.

Sustainable projects are those the industry adopts and drive economic value with. Doing this at Open Mainframe Project takes advantage of the expertise in building these programs.

  • Conformance programs with community requirements that the Open Mainframe Project Projects manage.
  • Training and certification programs through LF Training.
  • Badging using Credly to recognize individuals.
  • Events such as Open Source Days and Open Source Forum for the community to connect and collaborate.

Have world-class tools for measuring project insights and success.

LFX Insights is an analytics tool for all open-source projects hosted by the Linux Foundation. Its capabilities include the following:

  • Getting the visibility you need to remove bottlenecks at any stage of your project’s code pipeline. Drill down into performance metrics across every step in the development lifecycle to identify where you should focus your resources.
  • Ensuring the health and viability of the open-source projects you care about. Leverage data to help validate undertakings for investment and track the activity and growth of projects your organization is already involved in.
  • Showcasing your organization’s leadership and subject matter expertise in the open source community. Leverage affiliations to measure the impact of your employees’ contributions and capture the complete picture of your team’s impact

LFX Security is a tool for managing security for your project. Its capabilities include the following:

  • Monitoring your entire project for potential vulnerabilities with an aggregated project-level view of your entire software sandwich across source control systems and repositories, with the ability to remediate the found issues.
  • Identifying non-inclusive language and code secrets in your project to prevent embarrassing situations.

Leverage the collective experience and expertise of the Linux Foundation.

Open Mainframe Project staff collectively have decades of experience driving open-source projects and ecosystems in various vertical and horizontal industries, bringing the best practices to your project.

  • Press relations and analyst relations teams to increase awareness of and excitement about your project and receive regular reports on press mentions and comparisons to similar projects.
  • Open Mainframe Project can leverage the expertise of its parent organization, The Linux Foundation, which hosts other successful projects, including the Linux kernel, Let’s Encrypt, and Node.js.
  • You will have access to full-time Open Mainframe Project staff eager to assist your project in myriad ways and help make it successful.

Preparing to bring your project here

The “LF Way” is that there is no one way. The LF assumes that each open source project is different in its own way, which leads to building a unique governance and solution to sustain their communities.

Requirements to host a project here

The project must:

  • Use an approved OSI open-source license.
  • Be supported by a TAC member.
  • Allow neutral ownership of project assets such as a trademark, domain, or GitHub account (the community can define and manage rules).
  • Technical “do-ocracy” and separation of business governance from technical governance (we’re flexible on the model) are clearly documented (which we can help you establish).
  • Allow anyone to participate in the technical community, whether or not a financial member or supporter of the project.

Often projects are new open-source projects, but that isn’t a requirement - existing projects are welcome!

Project Preparation Checklist

  • Prepare draft mission and scope statement.
  • Identify internal teams within the mission and scope.
  • Identify developers internally
  • Analyze code for identification of licenses, license quality, and project dependencies
  • Assess the potential universe of project participants. Identify ecosystem constituents and concerns of each.
  • Identify any trademarks leveraged by the project (these will be owned by the LF neutrally)
  • Outline infrastructure, marketing any other requirements needed for the project.
  • Submit the project proposal to the TAC for consideration

The Open Mainframe Project staff is happy to engage and advise during this process - let us know how we can help!

What happens next?

Once the TAC Chairperson reviews the proposal, the LF Staff will follow up with the prospective project to begin the pre-TAC proposal processes listed below.

  • Complete and approve the Technical Charter and agree to transfer any relevant trademarks to The Linux Foundation or its affiliate, LF Projects, LLC, and to assist in filing for any relevant unregistered ones.
  • Have a successful license scan with any critical issues remedied.
  • Provide administrator access to all project tools, such as it’s GitHub organization, collaboration and communicaton tools, and build/testing infrastructure.

Generally, the TAC will schedule project proposals at the following TAC Meeting, provided there is at least one week between the submitted project proposal and the scheduled TAC meeting.

Proposed projects will have a 30-minute presentation timeslot at an upcoming TAC meeting as the schedule allows. The project proposal must include a presentation conforming to the structure below to ensure uniform and complete submissions.

  • Overview of the project and its purpose
    • If a project is new, it’s often helpful to share the vision for the project, the anticipated structure, and benefits.
    • If the project is an existing open-source project proposed to join ASWF, it is often helpful to schedule a project walkthrough for the community to understand better the project, including the architecture, structure, and how to get started using the project. This often helps review progress more efficiently.
  • How does this submission support the Open Mainframe Project Mission and Vision statements?
  • Does the project have any users?
    • How do you plan to attract users if accepted?
  • How many committers will you have upfront, and from which companies?
    • How do you plan to attract committers and contributors if accepted?
  • Demo and/or walk-through of the project

Key things to keep in mind for project proposals to the TAC

  • The TAC may consider the project for approval at the proposed stage during the meeting it is presented at, provided a quorum of TAC voting members are present. If there is no quorum of TAC voting members present or if the TAC is not ready to consider the project for approval during the meeting, the TAC will either:
    • Conduct a vote to approve the project via email, or
    • Continue the discussion via email or Slack, or during a future TAC meeting.
  • Projects accepted at the Incubation Stage are generally mature, stable projects that have existed for many years. Projects that are newly forming or incomplete should propose to join at the Sandbox Stage.
  • It’s rare to see a project accepted at the Active Stage, as even incoming projects that have existed for years require a fair amount of governance and operations changes as they come into the Open Mainframe Project; those projects tend to come in at the Incubation level and move to Adopted within a year.
  • The TAC may ask for the project to go back and address specific questions and/or concerns and then re-propose the project. Any project that the TAC has not approved, or any project that the TAC does not renew, can only re-propose the project with the approval of the TAC.