Do Linux Distributions Work Together? They Do Now! – The Open Mainframe EP 16

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the open Mainframe. The open Mainframe is a monthly video series produced by us here at Tech strong group in Tech strong TV in conjunction and in Partnership. With our friends at the open Mainframe project as part of the Linux Foundation.

My name is Alan Shimmel. I'm CEO of texture on group and I'm your host for today's episode. And what an episode we have?

We have a great episode here today, but before we jump into it, I want to introduce you to it. I think is going to be a great panel as well. Let me first introduce you to jack.

I'm gonna mess it up Jack a boot. boot close Jack why don't you introduce yourself to the audience really quick? Hey everyone.

My name is Jack abutpool. I'm a volunteer on the alma Linux project and a board member at the alma Lynx Foundation. Fantastic Jack.

Thanks for joining us today next up. Thank you. Next up we have.

Trying to get the hard names out of the way first for me. We have Ulrich Vanguard. And again if I miss pronounce, I apologize.

Correct, according to a little bit about yourself. Absolutely. Thanks Alan.

So my name is elidaikand and I am with IBM Germany as part of the Linux and Zee a development organization. I've been with that team for the past 20 years or so. I've been working on Livingston Mainframe pretty much since it came out initially.

And in my current role on responsible as a distinguished engineer for compilers and software development Tools in general for our platform. So everything that has to do with what do we need in order to actually get applications to run online social Mainframe. It was I'm what I'm responsible for and in agile.

I've been working with many learnings distributions because we fortunately do support large number of lens distributions on our platform these days and I've been working with a lot of those over the years make sure that everything works within our platform in that role and also part of this and working group. Absolutely, and that has we're going to get into it in the show, but the ability of the Z platform to accommodate multiple multiple devops multiple. Multiple Linux distros has certainly been a A key factor in you know widening their use but let's let me introduce you to our final two panel members here first.

I'd like to introduce you to Sarah Krish. Hi Sarah. Would you introduce yourself to the audience?

Can't type and Accenture then I'm a master student in part-time at Refrigeration Alexander University and I am an open suicide contributor since around 10 years. And now I am also a release engineer before it's real 96. And then I'm the teenage for us C systems team, and I'm also one of the founders of the universe distribution working group.

Fantastic. Thank you and welcome. Our fourth panel member is actually a repeat guest here on the open Mainframe.

She's been with us before and this is Elizabeth Joseph. Hi Elizabeth. Why don't you introduce yourself?

And thanks Ellen. So my name Elizabeth K Joseph. So I've been working in and around Linux and open source communities for a little over 20 years and so my day job, you know historically has been as a Linux systems administrator, but in my capacity in this group, I joined IBM about three and a half years ago to do developer advocacy and also work with open source communities who are interested in porting their applications to the ibmc in Linux one platform.

So in my work with Linux communities, I one of the authors of the official Ubuntu book and I've done a lot of work with Debian and I've kind of hopped around distributions throughout my couple of decades and the in the area so as the co-chair of this group with Sarah, I found collaboration to be a really important value in Linux development. So that's why we're here. Fantastic and welcome back.

Last but not least is my co-host. He keeps all the plates spinning over at the open Mainframe project. He's my friend John Meredith John welcome.

You want to introduce yourself besides being Chief blade spinner besides that. Yeah, one of the program director and director here at the open Mainframe Project Host of a whole bunch of projects focused on open source and the Mainframe and this is really an exciting one. We talk a lot about Mainframe in general.

We talk a lot about zos. We don't talk a lot about Linux on Z, which is actually we're the entire open mean frame project was rooted around, you know, when it launch back in 2015 was Linux on Z and so really excited to talk about and in a number of these Linux distributions that are supporting it. Absolutely.

So John, I think you you gave us our segue right into our beginning here, right? And and the title of today's show is do Linux distributions work together and they do now and we're going to get into that but I think first a little history you gave us a little bit as it relates to the open Mainframe project, but really the Genesis of all this was the idea of running Linux on a Mainframe and we think of it now is no big deal. but back, then it was kind of revolutionary like if not Downright illegal, right.

I mean of we don't want to get anybody in trouble Alan. Oh you wow, we're gonna run Linux on this. Auric you you work for IBM and the Z team but let's I don't know if you were there back then but can you give us a little insight into this history of that?

Absolutely. So to be honest, I was not one of the very very first folks who were working on the next on the Mainframe in the very beginning. It was sort of an undercover project was worked on in secret by just a few folks who had Been working with IBM on other the operating systems and very fascinated with Linux and there's bad time and thought well.

The beauty of Linux is that it's easily portable to any machine architecture and any platform and we know how to do Z operating systems. So why don't we have a look and see if we can't get if you can't get a little extra on the platform as well. and as I said, I was not part of that very first group, but In the end they convinced management that this was was a worth while thing to do and they were allowed to go public with what they have.

And that was back around Christmas 1999 when this initial announcement came, which was quite a surprise to most folks the looks rot many of whom had at that time never heard of the Mainframe before and I happened to be. Sort of just looking for a job. I had been just finishing up.

University and was looking for a job. I was looking at something around open source something on Lennox and I I noticed that and in conjunction with that. I saw that the IBM development lab in building in Germany where this all had happened under the covers was now actually looking to put together an official team working on that and hiring new people to join that team and I was one of the very first group of people who sort of joined that project after it had become public.

So I've been worth working with lornographs and C4. It's 22 years now. Not and the very beginning when I was still private basically from the moment it became public.

I've been I've been part of that so it's been well, that's commendable and congratulations. Yeah, right. Fantastic.

How many different Linux distros are supported on Z at this point does any or I give you know, if not anybody else know? Okay. Well, I guess what that depends first of all and that's a matter of debate.

now invent what you mean exactly by supported if you mean by supported like what many of our mind from customers mean with supportive that is that they can't call up someone 24/7 and they will be a guarantee response time and they will get the they'll get help. Then there are a few distributions that offer that support which I guess we call Enterprise level support. And right now there are three offerings with that scope that is of course retire Richard Enterprise Linux, which is obviously now part of IBM, but redhead interprets was supported on on our platform long before that happened.

So that's the one at the same time. We have Susan sless. This is a learned such price server, which was actually the first distribution that happened to support works at Mainframe.

And we also have Ubuntu which supported by canonical three with official support 24/7 support. but just because the others don't offer that Global support doesn't mean that they are not important right for many other applications in particular. If you're talking about platform that I used for application development or testing or with as infrastructure for containers.

You don't necessarily need that type of support and maybe you want something else. And for that reason we are very happy that in addition to these three Enterprise. distributions they have a whole host of what you could call community supported distributions, but also support are all platform and I Define sort of break through all of them.

I'm sure I'm forgetting the one of the other but there's sort of with each of the three Enterprise distr. I guess the community version. So there's Fedora which is the community version to real.

It's open Susa, which is the community version for Less. and then I'm in the relationship is a little bit different but Ubuntu is obviously based on Debian which is right one of the oldest and most Sort of a grandfather grandfather of the night so many of them. But we should make there are a few others.

Yes, right jack you work with the amount version of distro. Yes, so I work on amalenic and Just Ulrich, you might want to add another one to your list because we have commercial support available via like third-party Partners. So yes one more to add to your list.

So that's good. We're seeing growth in the growth in the ecosystem. Yeah.

So so we started working on our distribution a couple of years ago when Red Hat basically shifted sent those sent those stream model and and so one of the things that was very important for us was to make sure we cater to the community in the sense that many of them that were using dentals may have come from Rel or may have been running Santos and development and running well in production and one of the things they needed to make sure was that they had parity across all their platforms so we had A different architectures that we wanted to make sure that we supported and definitely, you know, D was was right up there came surprisingly highly requested by people which I didn't realize that there was you know, such a such as that's for running Linux on Mainframe, but apparently there is and so we decided to build our distribution for Zee and basically since we picked it up we've been running with it ever since and we've seen great adoption great interest from the community so far and it's really kind of opened another door into our community because we have a whole new group of you know, people that are really enthusiastic on about running Linux on on Z series that are now coming to us, especially because they can run the same thing on these series they can run the same thing on there like x86 platforms. They can run the same thing on their arm platform. So like it's it's very homogeneous for them and people picked up on that and we've had like an influx of people to the community because of that.

So it was it was a plus for us being able to open the open up a new architecture to people and then it it was a plus for I guess the community that we were offering that it was a plus for us that we added a new on-ramp into our community which was you know, it was sort of unexpected. I mean we did it because we felt that we could do it and it would be cool to do but then we had a whole bunch of people come to us because of it. So that was definitely great to see and it's been a great part of like this Synergy of working with the community to make this happen.

So sorry kind of a little bit of a question around because you mentioned a bunch of different architectures and I think each of the distros here run a bunch of architectures x86 arm power, you know, we could even get into more historical ones. What what is sort of what makes it really unique to be able to support this from kind of like a technological area? Like we're we're into being the impetus for these groups, you know working with one another to help support the architecture so I don't think we have we see similar things like this.

We certainly don't see the x86 side. I don't think we see it as heavily on the arm side. I can't comment for some of the other communities but like what why the impetus for a competitors like this coming together, you know to support the Z community.

So I think it comes down to a couple of things. The first thing is there's a lot of enthusiasm for it. And so we want to make sure that you know, it's we don't want to let that enthusiasm by the community go to waste right and especially when you have like a bunch of people that want to that want to help produce something we want to make sure that we're providing on-ramps into our community and and you know from that it fed into like open Mainframe and and the Linux distribution working group.

So we wanted to make sure that we were leaving those channels open and that you know, we we basically like providing the the impetus for that right? I think the second thing is many people still have very important workload that they want to see running on the architecture, you know, and certainly like part of Part of the group of enthusiasts that you know joined us. Um, they have paying customers that are running Linux on D and they needed something to jump to and so they've been a big part of this, you know, and and I guess they're they're motivation is maybe primarily like monetary, but you know, they've been like a great part of the community and they've been working with us.

I mean, you know, if they if anyone in the community want it wants to like take something and and make a business out of it. I mean, we're totally okay with that, you know, and but they've been like great citizens of the community, you know, they've contributed everything from like build Hardware to like engineering resource like hours of Engineers. It's like working on stuff and even them working on things like in their own spare time.

So I think those are a couple of the factors that kind of that kind of drive that you know, the the want and the desire to pick up the architecture so That I think they're there a couple more but I really kind of leave it at that because I think those are really like the main two and and the third thing which I think we should mention just before before I give it back to you is that again? This is like we're all about bringing everyone together in the broadest sense of the community. And so just having like another platform that we can work together with other distributions on you know, just the fact that the distro working group exists.

That was although that's also like a big part of it. Right? I mean we want to be we want to see the bigger picture and we want to work within the bigger picture and just having that, you know framework in place and like all the great things you do John just being able to hook up to that is also a very important piece of it.

Yeah, if I may add add to that John since you're asking why it doesn't organization like this exists for for Z, but not for the other architectures. I mean on the one and you obviously have Intel and in a sense interest the default architecture for the whole open source space. So every open source project by default Works in Intel so they don't need any special organization, right?

But just about every other platform has the problem that they I mean just from a pure. Like count of developers working on it. They are far away from from that ecosystem.

And so actually many other architectures do have organizations like that. For example even arm which I guess is sort of the second biggest I would say they have for example the lennaro Consortium, which we're many of the Contin space deliberately came together in a single Consortium to work together to improve open source ecosystem around the arm architecture and I believe risk 5 has something similar and so forth and for and for the sort of an IBM platform, obviously, it is an hour interest as IBM to grow their ecosystem and we as IBM who work on Linux and some of the core components like even Last Call on the compilers and so forth to make sure to support the platform, but we can do everything ourself. So we do need an ecosystem around it.

And therefore we are very happy to see an ecosystem forming and growing and this is something we only want to support got it. I'd like to ask a question. I'm going to direct the question is Sarah and Elizabeth as as the co-chairs of the group here.

I get why you want to have as many distros as you can support it, right? It's good for IBM. It's good for the community.

In general it's good to have diversity. But what's so important about them working together? So I can jump on this one.

So there's if you kind of step back and look at the Linux Community, there's always been this funny thing about distro wars and users talking about how they, you know, prefer certain distribution over to another but the truth is, you know, that the title of this of this episode is probably a little tongue-in-cheek as well because Linux distributions have always worked together. We've we were always in touch with each other we're working with the same Upstream projects for the most part. And so this this working group is kind of a logical continuation of that.

We're just specifically focused on an architecture rather than a different component. And so this yeah, it was just a natural progression for us. Okay, and from my point?

Know as I have written my bachelor faces at IBM. I have heard really often you are competitors. You are not allowed to work together, but from my point of view.

Yeah. I I am going to conferences. I have friends everywhere there.

He works Community. I'm cooperating and collaborating with the other littlest tributions. We are sharing our knowledge everywhere it opensource events and everything else and I wanted to show when we are operating.

We want to have a working group that we can hear if you and our knowledge and that was one reason that I wanted to found this working group and Yeah, and there's also the enthusiasm that that Jack talked about, you know, when we sort of try to list off the Linux distributions Rocky Linux is all so involved in this working group, but the there's also like I I will stumble upon people in chat or on Twitter or you know, wherever we are in the community wandering around on the internet and they'll be running something else. I bumped into someone who's running Gen 2 the other day and I'm like, oh cool that works. He's like, yeah, you know made it work and that, you know, we kind of wanted a place where all of those kinds of people could come together rather than just, you know, bumping into each other, you know, sporadically especially to to share bugs and share patches and like bring all of the Technical Solutions together, so we weren't off in our own space solving the same problems with the same software over and over again.

Excellent. So guys it's taking us a little while, but I think we've set the table, right we understand now. the charter of the group is to get these to work all of these this shows to work together to cooperate and Overall, I guess the feeling is it's been a success it to this point.

What can you point to as kind of things that you know led to that success? What are the fruits of that success to our end users out here as a result of the group. What do they see?

What can they do? I think one of the things that's really important to understand about a Linux distribution is it's built up of thousands of pieces of software that are developed by different people. So when someone like Sarah from open susay looks at a bill blog that failed on s390x she doesn't necessarily have a fundamental understanding of that particular piece of software from the get-go because there are thousands of them.

And so, you know when she's looking at a bill dog, you know, she first has to get familiar with some of that source code and that application what it's supposed to be doing and what it's not doing and that can take a lot of time once she sort of figures out what's wrong with it. She has to figure out like, okay, how do we fix this? What flags do we need to pass?

What how do we compile this in the right way? How do you compile this software at all? And that can take a really really long time just because of the nature of the Beast.

So there's this one example that I love to point to and it was there was an issue with a piece of client software and it turns out Fedora had fixed it already so it came A meeting this bill dog is failing on open suse and we're like I haven't even looked into it. I don't know what's wrong and Dan's like we have a patch for that and we looked at the patch and the patch was simply changing one of the flags that you're passing to it while you're compiling the software and then it worked fine on s390x. But what I'm trying to say here is that finding out that little tiny flag was the only thing that needed to be changed.

It may sound simple but it could have taken three hours of work for someone else to get to that point. So by sharing that patch and being at that meeting where that topic was brought up like we saved a bunch of time and that sort of thing happens all the time across this working group. So we collaborate on the mailing list first.

So like someone will send a mail saying like I ran into this problem has anyone else seen it or you know, this is the solution I found and then it's adopted by the other distributions. So we're saving a lot of development time just by sharing those things even if the solution sometimes as simple or if it's not we sort of have the power of all of us going together and saying hey Upstream project. This is broken for all of us and that may have a bit more Sway and getting it fixed as well.

Love that. It's a great great case great example, John. Let me turn the tables and ask you a question and you know as as the open Mainframe.

Project, you know as we cheap plate spinner when they brought this group idea to you, right? We're gonna do a group around this. What what was your thought no brainer or my you know, I got to be careful here this politics of play or what did you think?

I mean to me it was a no-brainer. I mean, especially like we talked about this group was rooted around the zelenix ecosystem and we saw in the last couple of years a huge growth on the zos and cobal side and you know from internal standpoint. We had a lot of folks that you know, we're looking at you know, where is where is the emphasis around Z Linux?

So I mean they're from Mr. Strategic area it obviously makes sense. But you know, I think just from a practical area what what I have found the more that I talk with not only companies here in the the open Mainframe project, but the Linux Foundation is a whole There are a lot of places you can do this collaboration.

In fact, there's kind of only this and and you all know. I mean Alan you you interviewed some of the people and you know the cncf and the CD Foundation a number of other groups as well. And when these organizations get to the point where they realize a a thing that they're after is bigger than their one company to be able to collaborate and drive this forward.

I mean not to speak very myopically about the Linux Foundation, but it's the truth. This is the only place you can do. This.

This is the only place or these vendors can come together. They can work out in the open they can collaborate and they can really, you know, drive a degree of change and you know, you know different collaborations that they just couldn't do another mean so, you know for the open Mainframe project and I'll even you know speak for the Linux Foundation. We're thrilled that these groups want to come to us with real to provide the space.

So it's okay to say something about that. the entire thing that Yeah, their Community distributions. Now.

Therefore the Upstream development is going via the community distributions for testing and everything else and then it is going to the Enterprise distributions and it is difficult to work together on Enterprise at 11 that will be done a little bit with security teams and everything else that they are collaborating but it is better to collaborate your community. And therefore there are also the community distributions. That is the reason why the community distributions exists here in front of the Enterprise distributions.

And yes, I have not all also from the Enterprise distributions that they tried it in the past to create such a direct collaboration back that was so difficult to do that because the customers should know about that and everything else and therefore. That was no success in the past. And we as a lot of distribution working group where I've got the benefits that we are open for all industributions.

Every detox distribution can try and can share the knowledge and on which way we are creating a collaborative environment for all. And that is not a case when only direct collaboration on Enterprise level, I would say. Hmm, so You Know Jack you open the show saying that You folks had an Enterprise distribution now as well as and some partners that were supporting it.

in light of what Sarah said, is that what you see too that we you know, the collaboration seems to be at the community level. Or is it in your mind follow through? to the Enterprise Yes, so I've been involved in Linux distributions for over 20 years now, which is a scary thought but it's the truth.

And yeah, I mean, I I think that it's definitely driven at the community level the nice thing about the distro working group is that it's a it's a Every distribution has kind of Their Own. Their own sort of mission and their own reason for existence and their own like path that they're trying to forge right in their own goals that they're trying to hit and I think that the beauty of the working group is that it's a single place where everyone can come specifically around the topic of like Linux on Mainframe and just focus our efforts there, right? So it's like sometimes the the you lose the forests for the trees and I think that this is like a great opportunity for us to all like step back and say hey we do have like this bigger mission of working together whether it's on the community level or the Enterprise level and then just having like a kind of like a safe space that we can a neutral ground that we can all agree that you know, everyone's welcome that and and hear the place that we can like really dive deep on this one particular topic, but I think Sarah the 100% right in that Sometimes it's much more difficult.

To drive that collaboration around the Enterprise space and definitely I see a lot more happening in the community space and and you know, like like Elizabeth mentioned stuff open happens and stuff like fedora. Because it is predominantly a community distribution and has sort of a wider reach right? So if you think of like the Fedora ecosystem the number of users using Fedora versus the number of users using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the number of developers working on it.

It's like two different scales of magnitude. And so, you know, you definitely have more eyes and more developers working in the community space. Then you have working in the Enterprise space, especially like looking to work together with each other.

fair enough Elizabeth let me let me turn to you if it's okay. So the groups off to a good start. We've got all this.

Goodwill here What is success look like for this group? I think we are there. I mean we had pretty modest goals for this first year of the working group and it was pretty much just getting the right people in the room and we were really fortunate that we had strong folks from several distribution step up pretty much right away.

As soon as we reached out. They were like, yeah, I'm on board. Let's do this and we hit the ground running.

So we have you know, our monthly meetings where people bring the issues and our mailing list is going well kind of looking forward into what further success might be is maybe bringing in a few more distributions, especially kind of the stragglers that I haven't quite engaged with um very much and we've also been talking a little bit about bringing in some of the Upstream projects because there are specific projects that we all use in our distributions that are more important to the Mainframe community and the users. So we're thinking maybe pulling in some of them into the distributions working group as well because not necessarily because we run into bugs often on the platform, but just so we're like, you know in their mind share of like hey, this is running on this architecture as well and we're paying attention and we'd like your input into how we can make your lives better and vice versa. Or from IBM's point of view.

Where would you like to see this group go? well I mean, first of all, I absolutely agree with Elizabeth that we are already after a very good start. Yeah from an IBM perspective one thing that Has already happened, but that might it's certainly something that we could still expand upon is that for us?

It is also a source of input in terms of requirements and things we should be doing just like one example that came up recently in the market groups that somebody was looking for a feature to better support a specific device that exists only on the Mainframe and you do support that device, but it wasn't sort of Complete and so he brought that up and I said, oh that's interesting. We never thought about that and brought that into our kernel team and they thought oh, yeah, right you should do that and sort of wrecked on on adding support for that feature. So this type of getting getting sort of a a like a short distance to to the distributions and then their users how they're using it can help also us as IBM to see okay here things requirements that they may have missed otherwise of things that we should be working on.

Fair fair Jack. I'm going to ask you the same question. What would be success for the for the open Mainframe group?

Or open Mainframe project. from this particular working group So I think that personally one thing that I would like to see is um more efforts around marketing and helping people understand what the power of the platform is. For example.

I saw something online yesterday that said that the Linux 1 Emperor four platform can run certain workloads at a 75% More Energy Efficiency rating than like comparable x86 and when you when you think about that like that that floors me right when we think about like the bigger problems that we all have to solve in terms of sustainability. And in terms of you know living on this planet being able to take a message like that to the community and it's really try to help them understand and show them like what the value of this platform is. I think that that's something that's just, you know would be totally amazing and I think that you know, that's probably one of the measures of But for this group is how well are we we all got in here because we know what we were getting into right and now I think it's time to make some trouble.

So how well how well are we taking this message outwards now and bringing this to the community and helping them really understand the value of what the what the working group is here for the value of what the open Mainframe Foundation is here for efforts like that is stuff that I'm excited about personally. Good trouble if someone was not paying on this statements for sustainability. One additional point which was really important related to sustainability is education of new contributors.

I would say and therefore we are sharing our knowledge everywhere and with some Linux distributions opens. Those are also we are doing also some mentoring it will open source and everything is therefore educating new contributors is really really around. What should we do in the future without a contributors purposely platform.

It opens loser around two until four contributors who are contributing continuously and then you have to educate group people which are fresh from the University and everything else and then we we want to really interesting to them and then To try to educate new people that and that you can keep in these people and I would say that's also something we want to do for the future. You know John it occurs to me that this is the kind of project that could get the open Mainframe group greater visibility within the Linux Foundation itself. Alright so much of the Linux Foundation is based on Linux, right?

And here we are talking about Linux on Mainframe. So we doing anything. Is there anything underway to kind of raise the the profile of this working group within LF itself?

Yeah, I mean we we're we're driving a lot of you know information about this group, you know across a lot of our different projects because we also see a lot of the projects here at the Linux Foundation, you know our part and parcel or part of these all these Linux distributions as well. So, you know, we're looking at it as in and I think one of the previous episodes we talked about on the new Mainframe infrastructure. It's gonna be coming on line next year.

We see sort of both of these pieces here as helping a lot of these open source projects, which frankly it's been in kind of the boat of the Linux distributions and a lot of ways to get some of these projects actually working on the platform. I mean, so you say has been doing this for years we've seen, you know, some of the red hat distributions doing the back and for years, you know, when Ubuntu started supporting the platform we saw, you know Upstream work being done in Debian in the same way and what we're hoping is is we can get some of these Practices that are being identified at the Linus distribution level because they're seeing across the board the the same sort of you know issues they come down to usually, you know, you know, eatingness and you know absolic ASCII and you know a few other sort of very unique things to this platform roll those up into these other project communities. So they're taking care of that Upstream.

So it's not the Linux distributions that are here having to trade back and forth patches all the time. They can get this working Upstream. So that is something that we're looking to help drive that practice with we're seeing the fact that we're actually gonna have Mainframe infrastructure as a part of that because the number one question we get asked from all these projects when they say, hey it would be great.

If you could better support the Mainframe they come asked great. Give us a Mainframe. And so that's another part of this whole thing.

So I think the overall visibility is rising and we're gonna start to see more Of these projects less looking at s390x which is the nomenclature for the architecture for the Mainframe on Linux. We're seeing you to see less of that having to be dealt with directly in this group. Although I think this group is going to be a key part of sort of the coordination the work that's happening.

But we're gonna see a lot of the heavy work now moving up into the projects because they're gonna have mean for it. They're gonna have Hardware to be able to solve these problems. Absolutely.

guys Unfortunately, what Eric did you have something you wanted that? Yeah, I just wanted to quickly add remark to what John just said because I 100% agree with them and it's not sort of the intent of this group to do anything of special on the side. I'll keep extra patches or whatever in this group just like the distribution just like IBM we want to work on our platform but everything we do absolutely needs to be contributed back upstream and we need to work with the Upstream projects and we have been doing that for many many years.

That's the only way sort of the longest business works. If you're not Upstream, then you will just have problems down the road. So 100% agreed with what John just said.

Yeah, and I'm hoping a group like this because idea and like to your point really Really carrying the torch of this for a long time. I mean we've had Sue say Obviously contributing in a few of the other distros, but I think in the end of the day everyone's kind of looked back to IBM for for all of this and what I'm hoping is this actually begin to spread that load. So it's not entirely on IBM to solve you have the different projects.

You have the different vendors helping the work. That's yep guys we're overtime to tell you the truth. But you know, I think this was a great discussion.

Because it's about a great project and a great a great group. That's really. you know when we think about Foundations Linux Foundation Apache Foundation what have you and the idea of allowing competitors to work together for the common good of the community.

I mean this is supposed to child for it. Right and and so congratulations and thank you to all of you for the work you doing on this group. We look forward to hearing more about it in future open Mainframe shows John another great another great job from the open Mainframe and good good stuff going on there all four of you.

Thank you for appearing for those of you watching. Thank you for standing in. If you have any questions go to the open Mainframe project.

It's part of Linux foundation and you could find out maybe join the group or at least get on the mailing list. And what have you there, you know, most of groups in these foundations are always looking for new members and help and volunteers. So by all means consider that until our next episode though, this is Alan show for Tech strong group.

Thanks for joining us here on the open Mainframe. Take care.