Happy 5th Anniversary, Zowe! – The Open Mainframe EP 23

Hi everyone. I'm Alan Shimmel, c e o of Textron Group, and you're watching the Open Mainframe. com, security Boulevard, cloud native, now, Techron tv, Techron, ai Digital C X O and some others.

Um, we, we do this show about once a month and we get some of the leading people in the, uh, mainframe modernization Open mainframe community to come on and talk to us about relevant topics to our audience, which is primarily folks who are involved in development, DevOps operations on, on mainframe and hybrid environment. So if you're one of those people, welcome, and if you've never caught this show before, we've been doing it, as I said, monthly for probably close to two years now. So we have, we have a decent amount of past episodes and I invite you to watch them at your leisure on TechOne tv.

Today's a pretty special episode though, because from, you know, of the, I think it's 20 some odd different projects and initiatives that are under the umbrella of the Open Mainframe Project at the Linux Foundation. Perhaps the, uh, star pupil, the Golden Child of the whole group is the open source project, Zoe, and we are here celebrating the fifth birthday, or I don't know if it does an open source project, have a birthday, or is it an, an anniversary? We'll, we'll delve into that, but it is the fifth anniversary or birthday of the Zoe Project and we're really pleased to, to see this milestone and, and actually to commemorate it.

We've got what I think is a great, um, panel for you. Let me introduce them to you now, leading off. And he goes first 'cause he wore the, he wore the Zoe t-shirt is our friend Joe Winchester.

Joe, welcome. Tell people a little bit about yourself. Hey Alan.

Thanks so much. Yeah, my name's Joe Winchester. I live and work in England.

You might pick up from my British accent. Um, I've been working for I B M for 25 years, and as you said, the last five years I've been involved with the project, um, Zoe and you're gonna hear all about it, um, today. Fantastic.

Thanks Joe. Joining. Joe is a, a semi-regular here on the Open Mainframe Project.

She always brings a lot to the show and it's a pleasure to have her back. Rose Atch. Hey Rose, you want to give a little background?

Thank you. Yes, I am an offering manager slash product manager at Broadcom. I work at Broadcom, but I have major roles within the Zoey community as well.

I'm the Zoey Onboarding squad lead. I am a member of the Zoey Technical Steering Committee, and I'm also a member of the Zoe Advisory Council. And, uh, love what I do with Zoey.

Thanks for having me. And that comes through every time you're on, by the way, your passion for this project. So thank you.

And then last but not least, I should have introduced him first because of course, I forgot how I'm going to mispronounce. His last name is Mike Sima. Sima Close Simonus.

All right. Close. Yeah.

Thanks for having me on. Yeah, Mike Simon, uh, product marketing director at Rocket Software. Uh, probably the newest, uh, person here to the Zoe and Open Mainframe Project community.

Um, but I do help lead go to market for our Zoe offering at Rocket. And, uh, excited to be here, uh, with everyone and excited to see how we can continue to get more involved in this, uh, project moving forward. Fantastic.

And then last, but certainly not least is my co-host on the Open Mainframe Project, but that's not all he does. He's actually the executive director of the Open, open Mainframe Project for Linox Foundation. John Murdoch.

Hey John. I should mention also Wellknown author John Murdoch. Hey, John.

There it is. There we go. Uh, nice being, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you Alan. Uh, nice being here.

And yeah, it's, it's, it's really exciting. It's kind of almost a, a full circle 'cause even though the Open Mainframe project, um, is coming on its eighth birthday, I think really when it started to hit that apex is, is when we started to see the Zoey project come together. And it was, you know, just, you know, these folks will tell the story more, but I think from an external perspective, it was really the whole idea of collaboration and open source around this community sort of, you know, hit, hit the big stage, um, with this.

And it's, it's, it's really an exciting thing. And geez, I can't believe it's been five years. It's almost flown by.

Yes, it has. It has. Alright, well, you know what, and I think we, the, the right, Ooh, I got a little tongue tied there.

The right way to, to start this is, is to start at the beginning and that is to sort of get, you know, a little background on kind of the birth of Zoe, right? Why, why, how, who, when, and for that, again, because he's wearing the t-shirt, I thought we'd start off with Joe, but Rose, I know you have a lot of of tribal knowledge on this as well. So feel free, Joe, kick us off.

And then the rest of the panel, feel free to jump in here and, and fill in the blanks. Sure. Thanks Alan.

Um, so for those of you that don't know, um, the, uh, I B M Z mainframe Computing platform, which is what it's now called, um, that platform is, is, is quite old. The genesis of that was actually in what's called the system 36, probably somewhere between, I'm gonna get this wrong, probably about 50, 50 plus years ago, probably close to, almost close to 60 years ago. It's a phenomenal computing platform.

Um, but it was created in an area that obviously predates the internet, predates graphical user interfaces, um, and it predates the birth of modern languages like, you know, Java and Node and so on and so forth. So one of the benefits of the platform is its longevity and it's the backbone behind financial computing across the world. But one of the headwinds that customers have always had is how can they, um, you know, stay relevant and modern with a newer workforce and newer computing paradigms like DevOps and AI and, and things like that.

Um, the genesis of Zoe actually came in 2017, I think it was when there was a customer who was being presented the modernization strategy that I b m had in place that Rocket software had in place, and Rose, we'll talk more about Broadcom at the time they were computer associates. And that customer very wisely, literally turned around to each three of those vendors and said, you can't do this alone, guys. This is a, a big hill.

You're, you're trying to climb. Let's, let's embrace some of the things that open source can bring. And that's really the genesis of the ZO project.

Yeah, absolutely. It was, it was a, um, an advisory council meeting, I believe, where we, uh, the, the vendors involve customers in, in showcasing, you know, what they plan to bring to market. And absolutely it was a, look, guys, this is a platform challenge.

This isn't something that an individual vendor should, should or nor do, we want them to tackle on their own. We want a platform solution. So that really was the genesis of bringing several vendors together to solve a holistic problem that the platform was experiencing.

And it wasn't simply that the platform was old, it was more, it, it also included the fact that other platforms were advancing in the areas of DevOps, in the areas of observability, in the areas, you know, all areas that enable technology to supplement and, and expedite, uh, business plans and, and time to market. And so we initially started through relationships and the fact that each of the vendors had relationships with the other vendors and, and they were able to broker a discussion about it and start talking about, Hey, what are you doing? What are you doing?

And interestingly enough, although it seems as though there was some overlap in technology, there really wasn't a whole lot of overlap in technology. We were approaching the challenges of, you know, skills gaps and modernization, what we call modernization, you know, a actually developing mainframe through modern languages and workspaces. Um, they were all sort of solving it slightly differently.

So bringing the app, the, the technologies together, which ultimately became the mediation layer for managing APIs, the desktop for, for launching apps through a web interface and the command line interface, um, they really seemed to have a lot of synergy right from the beginning. No doubt, no doubt about that. Um, John, I'm, I'm curious 'cause I I never spoke about this.

W when did you get involved with Zoe? We started having some conversations, uh, with various members of, of the, the Zoe community to be, um, probably earlier in the spring of that year, maybe even into the winter. And they were kind of a little few bespoke, um, you know, pieces there.

I think that group was really starting to wrestle with what, what would an open source project look like, because I think the majority of the people involved had just never done it before. And so a lot of it was just an investigatory of, but this makes sense. Like how could this work?

Um, you know, what are some of the models that um, could, could happen there? Um, and so we had a lot of off and on meetings. Um, and I think early summer was really, I think the big kickoff meeting.

Um, I remember being down in Raleigh, I remember it, um, from being a, a great I b M office, um, you know, down there in the, in the research park triangle. And I think there is where we really started to see the convergence of all of this coming together and, and a member of the great players, um, that were all a part of it. And, you know, it was really interesting 'cause I remember always the early, I mean, I've been involved with a lot of open source projects in the early days and they're all come from very unique places and, and I feel this one was as well, but I think that the big thrust behind everyone's excitement of what they could do to modernize this platform was a drive.

Like it was the thing that like lit everybody's belly up. And I remember Joe, like you and I even, you know, talking in a few of those early days and, and just some of the, like the, the interesting ideas of like what a vendor support looks like. Like how do we, how do we get more customers involved?

I mean, I, you probably remember these conversations better than me, Joe, but there was No, it's really interesting you brought, there was a very, well, well, before we go down this, uh, Mike, do you want to talk a little bit about Rocket as Well? I was gonna, yeah, I was gonna say like, so interesting I guess personal story in terms of my view on Zoe. Um, I, I think I first learned about it when I was attending Share St.

Louis, which must have been 2018, I think. Um, and where I was currently in the, in the industry, the vendor I was working for was sort of on the outside of all of this. And I recall there was a lot of skepticism, probably mostly what from within that vendor, but, um, 'cause it was seen as sort of competitive potentially, but also there's this interesting synergy and collaboration, uh, aspect of it too.

And so as I look back at on that now, and obviously on that Rocket software, we have a lot of involvement in the origins of Zoe and continuing to help it progress. Um, it's just really impressive to see actually how far it's coming. I won't go too far down that road 'cause I know we're gonna get there.

But, uh, so personally, just my view on it, it's, it is just cool to see, you know, coming from the outside and, and, you know, hearing about this sort of abstract thing and now seeing how it's actually playing out within our own customer accounts and within the industry is, uh, very cool to see. And Mike, do you remember, sorry, rose, do you remember on stage seeing John with Greg Ko from ca I think Andy Eunice from Rocket, Barry Baker from I B M and that statement of, you know, we are the four, you know, power players driving this forward, everybody must Yeah, that was amazing to, to get your feedback that that was because we had a lot of, um, I wouldn't say there was a kind of fear onset at the time that each vendor was like, well, isn't, uh, isn't the other one gonna trick, you know, keep something proprietary. Yeah, exactly.

Keep, you know, keep the keys to the kingdom locked away and somehow go rogue and rogue. I think you were gonna talk to that, but, but we've managed to deal with that, haven't we? Yeah, And I think it, it's, that seems to have gone very smoothly too.

Uh, maybe it was rough at first because people, again, were a little, you know, fear and certainty, doubt, skepticism, what have you. But, um, I think at this point you look at, you know, the conformance tools for instance and other projects within Open, open Mainframe project that, you know, vendors are getting involved with. I think a lot of people have at this point bought into the realities of it being a collaborative effort.

Um, and something that can help push, you know, our, all of our customers forward and the industry forward. Here's what's super industry, uh, interesting. I wasn't part of Zoey before it was Zoey.

And what I've been doing as part of a, you know, research effort to write a blog about the five year anniversary in conjunction with Open Mainframe Project. I've been interviewing folks who were there from the beginning. And although I suspected that there was some fear, uncertainty, and doubt, I asked them point blank, was there, was there tension in the room, you know, at that meeting in the I B M offices, because you've got a number of brilliant people getting together.

You know, did you sense that there was, you know, someone who, you know, wanted to be more dominating or what have you? What's interesting about Zoe, and, and you'll see it, it's evident in the community and everything that we do. It wasn't everyone, there's a common thread there.

They're compassionate, brilliant, highly motivated people that wanna do the right thing for the platform. And they all, I, I mean, these were independent interviews. Most of them said this made logical sense, it was the right thing to do.

And that has re you know, that whole concept has, has retained itself throughout the community. And you'll see it threaded throughout the community if, when you join the community. And I hope all of you do.

Yeah, I mean, I think that was one of the interesting aspects. E e exactly. Right.

I think that's the mainframe community as a whole. I I, I work with a lot of communities. This one here is such a close knit, but such a supportive, and everyone is looking at, you know, the mainframe is something that they wanna hand off to the next generation.

Like it's not just a technology if it's point in time, but it's something that many of them have had handed to them. And they're looking at how can we give you great caretakers and hand it forward, you know, not a, this isn't a, a technology for a couple years or 10 years or 15 years, but this is a technology for another, you know, 60 years, right. Um, or more.

And, and I think that's one unique aspect. And then I think the other thing that really stood out to me is, and, and Joe, you remember mentioning that with the, the whole keynote thing. I remember one of the comments, I forget who of us made it, but we said, this is a project not for these four groups here, but for all of you.

And that I feel blew people's mind for a good solid year. 'cause I remember doing, I remember even right afterwards we did sort of like a, uh, like a town hall esque talk about it. And we had so many questions coming up from folks and they were folks, it wasn't so much technology related, it was just sort of the concept it was doing was in a lot of ways just blowing their mind, which is a little bit interesting because, you know, we trace so much from open source back to the mainframe community E exactly, yeah.

The genesis of the mainframe and share and people sharing stuff. Yeah. It's really in people's d n a And when you were looking, when you were looking out the room, and you're probably seeing a lot of, you know, 50, 60 year olds mm-hmm.

In the room, they really kind of woke up and thought, wow, you're taking us back to our roots. This is amazing. And I think Rose, and we've seen them come with us on some of that journey as well, in that they're really excited now.

So it's, and one of the things we had Rose was that all, all of the old, with all of the new, I've been involved with open source projects that have failed. Right? Um, pre you have to bring forward your existing generation as well as appealing to the new kids on the block.

You see this with successful bands, rock artists, whoever they are, right? You have to bring along all of the appeal to everybody. Mm-hmm.

And Zoe does that. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think, I think one of the, oh, sorry, Alan. No, No, you go Ro I I was going to say, I think that that sort of morphs nicely into evidence of maturity in that we've had community members come and go, and the project not only survives, it thrives. So, you know, there, there are, there are all of these signs that, you know, we're, we're successful on or we're being successful and hope to continue on so many levels.

It isn't just about the technology, it's about the ability to transition from one group of people to another group of people, introduce new releases, maintain old releases, welcome new incubator squads, and new projects and new work groups. Work through that, while at the same time recognizing that there are other aspects that we need to keep a lookout for, like security and open, open Ss, ss, f standards, those kinds of things. So we've naturally moved towards a mature model, um, and in, in some senses without even realizing what we're doing and, and the gains that we're making along the way.

I, I will tell you as an outsider, an observer, and that's kind of my role in general here at Techstrong, right? We observe our, the communities, we, we we service. I think a couple of things, uh, play into Zoe's success.

Number one, this is a, a very tightly knit community, and it always amazes me how many of them can trace their roots back to I B M. 'cause though we have a, a bunch of great companies involved, Broadcom, you know, ca the predecessor, B M C, uh, rocket and others, um, so many of the people, we only have one hardware provider, the rest of it's kind of software. And so a lot of the people come from I B M and they have that shared, um, legacy that shared kind of environmental training at whatever you want to call it.

And, and I think that plays a lot into it. The second thing is, is I think quite frankly, especially with the advent of cloud, not so much DevOps, but the advent of cloud, all of a sudden, for the first time in 50 years, there was serious talk about, well, maybe the mainframe's a little long in the tooth. Maybe the mainframe isn't, isn't, you know, the the platform of tomorrow.

And I think that ignited such a visceral reaction in this community. Hold on. You know, don't throw dirt on us yet here.

Right? We, we, there's still things we do Penny for Penny. We're still best platform in the world for certain things, and we can dance to a different beat and we can, you know, you can't teach this old dog new tricks, right?

And I, I think there was a lot of that. I, I, it's interesting when you talk about cloud. So there was a period in between when there was a kind of, you know, distributed world versus mainframe world.

And I saw that very much as a standoff. But what's interesting when the, the cloud came along and the internet was that it wasn't like an either or. So there, there's a buzzword called Hybrid Cloud, and I hate to be the first to mention it in this call, but it's a very sort of apropo, a lot of our mainframe customers.

Um, and they're also Broadcoms and Rockets and others, they're wanting to adopt these, you know, so you see very, very deep technology stacks that traverse everything from, you know, my mobile phone, if I log onto my bank now, I'm getting data from a mainframe at the back, going through edge computing and mobile providers and payment providers. So having that view of the world where another wonderful thing that mainframe, John, this came up was when we did our initial design thinking session back in building 5 0 3 and Research Triangle Park. So design thinking is all about let's focus on a sort of north star, or no more than three things.

And the words open, simple and familiar with the three that we came up out of that workshop so that the mainframe is no longer something special that people put in the corner. And you have to have a sort of 10 year education to learn. You can use familiar tools, familiar languages, and familiar paradigms, open, open source, but complete open governance, open model, um, yeah.

And, and make things simple. So the cloud is not hostile to the mainframe. I know some people like to play them off, but it's not, mainframe is very much part of a world of, of hybrid cloud computing.

It exists. Yeah. I think it's been a driver for a driver for actually modernizing in place, we like to say, um, on the mainframe.

And interestingly, if, like, if you look through the, in the context of Zoe, I think like things like DevOps, for instance, have been drivers for modernization for a number of years, um, but in different corners of the industry, it's been approached, you know, in various ways, like, you know, creating or adopting ides and trying to build those out, uh, for modern tooling. But then Zoe, I think what allows or enables the longevity of it is the fact that it is open. And I think that's why we're seeing it start to prosper, is because it's not contained in some, you know, uh, proprietary type of I d e that's, you know, only on platform.

And that's really what the differentiator is. And I think the appeal of it too. Yeah.

Spot on, Mike, I think, I think the non vendor lock-in, right? And, and you know, you mentioned DevOps. In my opinion, DevOps has been Zoe's best friend.

Yep. And it isn't, it isn't Zoe's one and only, right? And that's what we have to, and in some aspects we're fighting that now because we drove so hard with DevOps and Zoe and, and C I C D we're almost, we've almost pigeonholed ourselves into, and we've won the DevOps, um, best DevOps solution for mainframe award year in a row running.

Um, but, but we're not all about DevOps. It just so happened, happened that the industry was moving towards DevOps and we needed a solution that spanned mobile mainframe enter zo, right? Lay the ZO framework on top of your Z OSS implementation.

And now you've enabled yourself, you've given yourself the opportunity to start leveraging existing tools, practices with mainframe in the picture. That doesn't mean that it's only DevOps folks, right? Yeah.

Now we've opened the door for modern IDs, we've opened the door for dashboard off host taking information from the main accessing information through c L I on the mainframe, leveraging all of those cartoon character tools, as we call them out in the open source world that all of the developers and engineers have been leveraging for years and years and years are now available for mainframe. That's the story of, look, folks are, our people are retiring, they only know mainframe. We've got Zoey now.

Doesn't really matter so much. And Alan, just, by the way, the wheel is a very old invention too. But when you've got something awesome, Don't fix what they broke.

Right? That's Right. That's right.

Absolutely. The, the wheel still works. And, you know, from Corvettes to Tricycles, it still works, and it has a purpose, and it can be as modern or or as old as you'd like it to be.

Yeah, Absolutely. Well, I mean, I think Alan, you, you, you, you talk with a lot of folks on DevOps and I, I would, I would say that you probably wouldn't say DevOps is a bad entry point into any organization, right? No.

Well, today, if it's not ai, it don't mean any, it don't mean a thing, but that's a whole nother story. Yeah. It, well, maybe we could talk about that.

I would like to transition us though, into, Hey, it, it's the fifth anniversary, fifth birthday here. As we look now at, at Zoe as a five year old, what, what are, what are the, not what the highlights were over the last five years, but as we sit here today, what do you see as the best values that Zoe provides today to people and the biggest attraction to people? I think we've hit kind of the, what the aspirations were, and, and in many ways we've even exceeded them.

But as we sit here at five, what gets you most excited? Rose, you wanna kick it off? Sure, yeah, sure.

I think the, the evidence that more and more mainframe shops are seeing the value of Zoey and are actually starting to move it into their environments and into their production environments. And so, you know, Joe, Mike, I don't know where your head's at, but in, in, in my world, I see every main, every mainframe shop wanting Zoey in their, in their organization and not, again, not just for DevOps, but for the, you know, what we're calling that modernization value that it offers to, um, bring forward, uh, user interfaces that exist everywhere else, you know, visual Studio Code, um, IntelliJ, you know, what have you. Um, but also to enable, you know, you, you name it, whatever, technology's out there, whatever buzzword is out there, whether it's, you know, chat G p t or AIOps or, or what have you.

We've, we've given through Zoey, we've given the platform a shot at every new technology that gets introduced. And we're starting to see it within Zoey now. We have a chat bot project in the works.

We have, um, a, a, a new work group called Event Management that is working on, you know, outbound communication where Zoe c l i works on inbound communication. Um, and we've got folks, we don't have to go find folks that wanna work on this stuff. They, they want to work on this stuff in combination with mainframe.

Absolutely. Yeah. I, I agree.

I think the customer adoption has been phenomenal. It's beyond anything I could have kind of predicted. Um, but I mean, just looking at my calendar today, I've, today I've already been talking to four different customers around Zoe, some of whom are very new.

They just want a little introduction, some of whom are so deep into the technology. You know, they stretch the limits of my, of, of my domain expertise, which I find very challenging to be at both ends of that. The thing that I am most proud of about where we've got now in the last five years is the education programs.

So one of the things that the Open Mainframe project was able to really bring that, I think, John, it coincided around the launch time of Zoe, there was a massive need for cobalt skills, and there's a Cobalt education program. And rather than teaching people on what, I'll use the word legacy, legacy interfaces, green screen terminals, they said, you know, the younger generation are using, uh, more productive tools like Visual Studio Code. Zoe has a plugin for that and, and how that's grown.

And then other education classes. So I now, um, interview early hires, early professionals for I B M who go, oh yeah, we already learned about that at university. We used the education course.

I was at, um, in Oslo in Norway recently at a conference and went to a talk all about student learning. And I was in the room just taking photos because they were saying, I'm teaching my students using open source technology. I'm teaching my students using Zoe.

And that story has been repeated everywhere. And I even go to customers and I say to them, why are you using Zoe? And they said, 'cause everybody we hired from this local university, they come in here and show us these amazing tools that, that the Open Mainframe Project have created.

So it, it goes right back to the genesis of Zoe. It's what the customers wanted. It's grassroots.

Yeah, That's exactly what I was gonna say in terms of, I guess just add color from my end. And what I'm excited about is just how, um, you know, as user Adoption Con continues to increase, even in colleges, apparently, as Joe's saying how that's gonna shape the Zoey, uh, project and community and even other projects beyond that, within Open Mainframe Project. Um, and I think it's sort of a, it's unstoppable at this point, you know, the momentum that it has.

So it's gonna be really cool just to see how it continues to evolve. You know, the, the thing that comes to mind, Alan, is, is, and it's any, and you know, like great open source projects, there's the collaboration, the project, but there's the ecosystem that gets built from it that creates so many opportunities for careers, um, you know, for vendor products. I mean, the Conformance program, um, that was launched a few years ago.

I think we, we were on a call earlier today, and I think we kind of have 75 different offerings, um, on that program. I mean, these are folks that have built commercial offerings. This isn't just like an open source project that people toy around with.

This is something that vendors are basically defining new revenue streams and new engagements for. Um, and you know, this whole sense of just shared value, the, there's a model out there, the Kokomo model, and we've been using that, um, around, you know, we've been being used for years. It's been used to sort of describe the value of the Linux kernel in, in billions of dollars of value.

And we recently did a, an estimation on the Zoey side of things, and I think we assessed the Zoey project that a $9 million shared r and d value, right? So it's, and think about that is from the cost to recreate that from scratch, you're investing that much versus if you're a vendor and you get involved, and, and we've talked to it, Joe, I think you've talked to a ton of them that they're saying, wow, we can just, we can yank out all of this custom stuff that we did before that, that Zoe did the same thing as, and we can use Zoe and get to market faster and leverage that $9 million investment that's already there. Yeah.

There's phrase an open source called undifferentiated heavy lifting. Yeah. And Rose, you touched on security as we deal with things like multifactor authentication, people are challenged for their passwords only once using Advanced Outand products.

Uh, there's a whole ecosystem. People want what's called federated identity. They might sign onto a public cloud looping back, Alan, your thing about, it's not cloud versus a mainframe, but they might log onto something in A A W S or Google Cloud or I B M Cloud or Azure Pipeline, get an identity token and want to flow that through to z o s.

No single vendor can do that, right? That involves huge collaboration. And that's something that the Zoe community brings, and that is part of that huge stack that John just talked about.

You know, undifferentiated heavy lifting. Yeah, that's a great phrase. I like that.

And, and that, that's that really, I mean, Ellen, like how many open source community, I mean, projects do you interview and that's like, that's the underlying story, right? Yeah, Absolutely. I, I mean it also, I think something that needs to be mentioned here is also what, what's made or helped make Zoe so popular is the Linux Foundation model, where we give these open, not we, the Linux Foundation gives these open source projects, a a neutral playing ground, a neutral stadium, a neutral playground to, to build on where you can have a Broadcom and an I b m and a rocket, and, you know, so many of the other vendors that are involved in, in a project like Zoe, and, and they, you know, of course they compete, it's the nature of the market, but it's that coopetition model where, hey, if we lay down a baseline, may the best company win in terms of what you build on top of it, but at least we all have this baseline of functionality that, that that's the rising tide that lifts all of these boats, right?

And it's that foundational model, which is a, you know, it's not just Zoe. It's made the Lennox Foundation as popular as it is because it, it gives, it gives everyone a seat at the table, and mind you, not just the vendors, but users and contributors and you know, everyone, even someone like me, um, if near, if not, but for the grace of God, right? Uh, so I, I, I think that's something that we need to, to call out in here.

And, and as we sit here at the fifth anniversary of Zoe, you know, just a quick shout out to the Linux Foundation in the, in the y open frame project there for, for fostering this, uh, neutral ground of, of companies to play with. Guys, we, we have, we have little under 10 minutes left, eight minutes, something like that. I'd like us to now put on our, you know, wizard glasses and look into crystal balls and, and, and give our best guesses or analysis or whatever you want to call it, if you feel confident in terms of, okay, if we're sitting here at Zoe at seven, or Zoe at 10, or Zoe at 15, right?

What do we, where do we see this project going? What kind of functionality is going to keep it top of mind with the community? What is the community?

What is technology gonna demand of it? Right? I, I mentioned AI before AI and, and I'm, I'm talking about generative ai, large language modules.

So much hype, so much, you know, being taught, spoke about with that. Does that have a place in here? What else?

What else do we want Zoe to be? So, um, I'm sorry. Go ahead, rose.

You know, I, it, it's, it's an interesting question and, you know, the cop out product manager, uh, answer to that is, depends on where our customers are going, right? Of course. And, and, um, I guess one of the challenges that we faced from the, from the beginning and what we'll continue to face as we move forward with, is we have to continually earn the trust of our consumers.

It isn't something that is one and done. And, you know, I, I think, um, you know, staying, staying up on security and, and where the world goes with respect to security practices, um, I think will have to be first and foremost, I think we have a ways to go, uh, to be, to be, uh, fully compliant in, in the industry. I think, uh, although we, we are, you know, prioritizing that we're very close on many levels, uh, in lockstep with what's what's currently, um, available.

But I also would like to think that, you know, on the, on the other side of Zoe, meaning the community side, um, one of the disappointments I think that we have as a collective community that I think, uh, we'd like to see turned around five, 10 years from now, is that primarily the committers are still coming from vendors, not necessarily from consumers. And one of the benefits I think that we all agree on with respect to open source is you want something, commit something. That's, that's really the, the give and take and, and the plus of, of being in the open that you don't have to ask a vendor anymore.

You have the ability to join the project and, and commit code or work on a section of code that will benefit your particular organization and your need. And you know, we're not, we're not seeing that yet. And I think all of us would love to see that transition happen, happen over the next several years.

But, you know, we're mainframe, it takes a while, but, but when we get there, man, we nail it. It, you're right, Rosie, it will take a while. I'll show you a frustration.

I mean, John, just to give a plug, the Open Mainframe Project Summit is coming up soon in Las Vegas, I think September. Mm-hmm. Um, and John and I, we've been working a couple months in New New York, a month after that, New York, a month after, we've been working for a number of years, John.

And so many times I've wanted, we've brought customers close to presenting and they've always fallen down because of, but it looks like we might have one or two actually able to keynote with us on their customer success stories. And it's a, it's a slow progress rose, but it's the mainframe community, and they're naturally slightly resistant to change, which is what make it's a gift and a curse. It is a gift.

'cause it means that you're secure and you've got like 80% of the world's data. Uh, you know, and there's an interesting thing. It's a, it's a play.

Alan, to your point, I remember one time something happened about, something happened, some network or some something, some critical part of the world's, it broke. My lights have just gone. And, and, and, and all the internet picked it up as like, oh, the mainframe's gone down and it's a glass half empty, glass half full.

It was actually, it wasn't, it was an operator. It wasn't anything inherently wrong. And my son turned to me, he was like, wow, that's you, what you work on.

He wasn't, what you work on is broken. He's like, oh my gosh, what you work on is important, and it is important. But we are, I think, rose, I think that will come, I hope that will come.

You know, I, I, I think you gotta look at the, the nature of open source contributions, right? So I've been involved in open source for many, many, many years, starting in the security side of things. Look, the average open source project is a smashing success if you have more than this many contributors, right?

If you have more than a handful of contributors, you're doing pretty good. The the fact is, you know, even the biggest projects or the most successful projects, however, you wanna measure something like 98% of the people just use the pro, just use the product. They don't, they don't report bugs.

They don't contribute code. They, they don't, they don't do anything other than use the the software. Um, I think one of the things that Zoe has going for it is it does have a broad base of support among the, I mean, you, the three companies you represent right here, a pretty damn good as a start, I'll tell you.

And so we don't rely so much on individuals. I'm not sure if that's a tipping point, right? Individual contributions as a indi indicator of, of health here, especially, and I'll shout it up, Broadcom, rocket, i b m, these are companies who have dedicated, they're paying people to be involved in Zoey.

Not a lot of companies do that. Not, not just Zoey, I mean, open source in, in, in general, right? They're users.

And, and I don't mean it in a necessarily bad way, but they're users. They don't put resources into giving it back. So I'd be careful what I wish for.

I I, I think having the contributions we get from, from the corporate members of Zoe, I don't know, maybe we're a little spoiled. It's, it's not that, I mean, it's, you're, you're not wrong. I mean, I, I, I, the, the book here, I have a whole chapter around, you know, corporate contribution, but also just sort of, you know, looking at what, what you're kind of referring to a lot of is like sustainability, you know, and how this project can be carried forward group to group, generation to generation, things of that nature.

And honestly, a sign of health is that the biggest contributor should be way less than half of the total contributions, you know, meaning that you could lose any one of them and the project's gonna have a hit, but it's not gonna crash into the ground. Like there's still the majority of folks around it that can help move it forward and, and help fill some of those gaps. And I think that's been a unique thing from Zoe from the start, is it really came in of almost like each group putting a third of the puzzle in.

And over time, we've seen some cross mingling there. You know, we've seen, you know, we're, where Broadcom was really focused on bringing a lot of the c l I and those components. We've seen them cross mingle into the a p i into the desktop side.

I b M was a lot of the i, the a p i mediation, a lot of that backend, we've seen them cross mingle across and, and rocket the same forth. And then, then we've seen other vendors slowly come in and fill in different parts of the gaps. And that's, that's healthy.

And, and the fact that, you know, you're the, the model of that these companies here, you know, the conformance program is a great example, are seeing a return of investment happening because those customers are investing more and more into their mainframes. And Zoe is the reason, means that they're gonna continue to invest back into Zoey. And, and that I think goes for the next crop of vendors out there that are looking at how do we refine our applications?

Is that same model applies. You know, you invest in this community, you're gonna get a greater multiplier out. I mean, you're gonna get nine 10.

I mean, I've even seen 40 x multiplier of your investment out of it. And then you roll part of that just back in and it's, it's, you know, it's, it's the efficiencies out there. And you know, Alan, you talk in the, you talk with the Kubernetes folks, that's the story there.

You talk with any other large scale open source community, that's the model that repeats Essentially. We're not just contributors, we're consumers as well. And you're owners That, that, and that is self-sustaining.

Yeah. And you're owners, like every single person that puts something, that's the unique part. Everybody who puts something into Zoe, you own a piece of it.

Like that's a part. I mean, Alan, you mentioned the Lytic Foundation model. That's what it's predicated on, is each one of these companies, it's not the Open Mainframe project is owned any Zoey code.

Um, who owns the code is every single person that's ever contributed to it. So it is a true community owned asset, and if you wanna change something about it, you show up to the table and you do it. And if the whole community wants to shift a direction, the whole community shifts a direction.

That's, that's the power. I mean, that's, that's what's kept Linux as it has been for decades. And, you know, that's what is the same model we see across, you know, at least a thousand other open source project, Linux Foundation, and, and more.

Hey guys, we gotta wrap up here. In wrapping up, I want to mention a few different conferences. So if you're, if you're attending any of these, it's a great opportunity to sse yourself in what's going on with Zoe to get involved to find out.

The latest one, I think is the Share Conference coming up. Um, Mike, do you want to, you have the, the, the, uh, details on that one? Yeah, so I'm not attending this one, so I forget which dates it is specifically, but Joe and Rose, I'm sure you remember, but it's, I know it's in New Orleans, it should be a good time.

Is it the 13th or? Yes, August 13th through 18th. Yeah, that's right.

In, in New Orleans on the Monday we have a complete day of Zoe. We're calling it Zoe Day four sessions back to back on Monday after the keynote. And then we have a roadmap session on Wednesday, and lots of other sessions filtered throughout the week, and Joe's gonna take us home on, on Friday with a, with a session.

Um, but yeah, so he has its own packets there. I mean, may have some cake Sure. If you, Sarah, we may have some Cake, little birthday cake and, And shares.

Great. And a photograph, a great conference And photograph. All right, we'll, we'll put 'em up here.

But, uh, shares a great conference in, in, in any event, whether you were going for Zoe or not. Um, next, I, we mentioned that it's an I B M conference in, in Las Vegas, I think in October. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Um, September. It's September.

Who has details? John, do you have the details on that one? Yeah.

Um, so the Open Mainframe Summit, we're doing sort of in two halves this year. Um, well, two different events on two halves, but, um, the first part of it is in Las Vegas on September 11th. It's really the day zero of the I B M Tech exchange, which is sort of a new event for I B M.

Um, but it's kind of the bringing together of a lot of different events that they've had over a number of years. org, um, and, and check it out. Um, but this is really an event that's gonna dig into not only Zoey, but some of the other great work that's happening in the project, and just open source in general, um, on the mainframe.

So if you're, and it's great. If you're already an I B M customer, you're likely going to that. Um, but if you're not, that's an event to check out and, and you can check out the website, um, for more details on that one.

It's, uh, Joe speaking, rose is speaking, um, Mike, I can't remember. You might even be speaking. I don't remember.

But we, we've, I think we have a lot of great representation across our communities. Excellent. That's September 11th in Las Vegas, and then the month later is New York, Correct?

On, on November 1st. Um, and this is a part of the open source in finance forum. Um, we're having the open mainframe, uh, summit, uh, New York City.

Um, we're part of the opening keynote and then a lot of great sessions. And this is, if you're, if you're in the financial services industry, um, it says in your backyard, it's right there, you know, right there in Manhattan. Um, but we're gonna have some great talks.

Um, the, the schedule's getting announced a little bit past this recording date, but I think by the time it goes live, this will have gone live. So I'm not previewing things too much. Uh, there's gonna be some great talks on security, great talks on open telemetry, great talks on Zoe.

Um, a new project we have gsa. So definitely, uh, that's a great event. And, and especially if you're just not familiar, if you're in financial services and you're not familiar what's going on in this industry.

I mean, chance of grid, if you're in financial services, there's a mainframe somewhere. And this is a great way to kind of understand what's going on over there and how that can connect back to the work that you're doing across your enterprise. So not one to miss, I mean, a really great and the Enos folks and the open source and finance folks, I mean, just like I bm they put on a great event.

So, and it's, you know, one great day. Yeah. I have A quick plug.

If you're in Europe, there's a conference called G S e Guide Share Europe, UK in England. And make sure you pack an umbrella. 'cause it'll be raining by the time That's in November And that's also in November.

Uh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's the beginning of November.

Mm-hmm. So that's Guide Share Europe in the uk. The uk.

Uk yeah. Uk. Yep.

There you have it. Four different places. But, and then, you know, through the magic of the internet, you can go to the Open Mainframe project, part of the Linux Foundation at any time to stay up to date with what's going on with Zoe as well.

Panel, I want to thank you all for coming on today. This was a great show, a great way to celebrate Zoe's fifth birthday or anniversary. Um, and you know, each of you have made your mark on, on this project, and I thank you for all that you guys do around it and making it successful.

Uh, I'm sure we'll see you all again on future panels and thank you very much. John, you want to have the last word and we'll rock we'll wrap it up. I mean, I think I just want to thank you know, you three, but then with you, the broader Zoe community, the hundreds of contributors, the many, um, executives and folks behind the scenes that really help empower this.

And then the entire downstream and user community, uh, you know, these, these efforts are grassroots up. I mean, this isn't one person effort, and I think it's a sign that, uh, a, a group like this comes together because of that. So thank you all, and I hope in five years we could be doing the 10 year anniversary show.

Absolutely. Alrighty. Hey, on behalf of the Open Mainframe Project, Linux Foundation, n Techstrong Group, thank you very much for sitting in on this episode of the Open Mainframe Project.

We'll see you at our next episode next month, but until then, be safe and be well. This is Alan Shimmel. We're out.