In spite of Linux running on the platform for 25 years, the mainframe community is notoriously proprietary. Organizations operating on the platform are particularly security conscious and dependent upon vendors for support and fixes. Fortunately, in the past several years we’ve built a thriving open source community that subverts the status quo. Are we the only ones?
This talk will cover how a handful of open source conscious community members have built up successful open source communities in the film, automotive, and mainframe-driven industries, and driven adoption across their respective industries.
Strategies include identifying tools that member organizations wanted to collaborate on, launching vendor-neutral foundations with support from the Linux Foundation, the ASF or others, celebrating projects and community members, and learning best open source practices from organizations like the TODO Group.
Based on these experiences and interviews with contributors, this talk concludes with a checklist of strategies and key things to keep in mind when building out communities that are more resistant to open source, but which can greatly benefit from it.
Elizabeth K. Joseph is a Linux systems administrator who now leads the Open Source Program Office for IBM Z where she works with the community to explore Linux and z/OS workloads on mainframes. In the course of her open source career, she's been deeply involved in various projects, including Ubuntu and OpenStack (and has written books on both) and across various industries where you might not expect open source software to be popular. In her role today as part of the IBM Z Ecosystem team, she regularly works with open source software communities on their own porting efforts.