Guest: John Mertic (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Project: Open Mainframe Project (LinkedIn, Twitter)

Last September, Open Mainframe Project hosted the Open Mainframe Summit in Philadelphia, its first in-person summit in the post COVID-19 era. Highlights of the event include Broadcom‘s donation of an actual mainframe to help developers gain access to the platform and the community’s focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We conducted over a dozen interviews at the Summit, covering a wide range of topics. In this episode of TFiR Mainframe Matters, I caught up with John Mertic, Director of Program Management for Open Mainframe Project at the Linux Foundation, to discuss some of the work the Open Mainframe Project is doing and their milestones and achievements. He talks about bringing in new students and nurturing the next generation of mainframers, and what they are doing to bring the community together.

Key insights:

• Mertic explains how Broadcom’s hardware donation will fill the community’s long-standing need for mainframe access.
• Access to the mainframe will also enable sister projects such as OpenSSF to test against the platform and help improve its security.
• The Open Mainframe Project is starting to see their project communities mature. A recent survey found that 10% of customers are using Zowe in production, with 10% more looking to do so in the next year (compared to the 2020 survey results of 19% and 50%, respectively).
• Mertic expresses the importance of diversity in the community and talks about the Linux Foundation mentorship program.