DEVOPSdigest

The Open Mainframe Project, an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared tool sets and resources, announces two new projects that will redefine developer experience on the mainframe.

Zorse is a new open source project that will provide the resources to train and evaluate large language models (LLMs) for mainframe programming languages.

The zopen community is a vibrant global open source community that works together to expand the availability and development of open source tools for z/OS, making it a first-class modern platform.

Zorse: Specifically with mainframes, LLMs perform comparatively poorly at reading and writing mainframe code because there is very little data for them to train on. Zorse aims to solve these challenges by collecting large, production-quality datasets to improve LLM's ability to understand and write mainframe code. The new project will also provide an evaluation tool to measure the performance of LLMs on mainframe programming tasks. Ultimately, this will help build Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding tools that will boost the productivity of mainframe software engineers.

"AI is revolutionizing how organizations utilize mainframes by enabling real-time optimization, predictive maintenance, and enhanced data analytics," said John Mertic, Executive Director of Open Mainframe Project. "Now under our umbrella, Zorse is the perfect complementary project to the COBOL Programming Course and COBOL Check. Together, our projects will offer an opportunity to blend education and practical testing for modernizing and maintaining legacy systems."

The zopen community: Newly contributed to the Open Mainframe Project, the zopen community is a global community dedicated to making a modern collection of popular open source tools available for z/OS. They aim to make the platform more accessible to modern developers and organizations embracing open source technology. With more than 200 projects and a thriving ecosystem, it will shape the future of z/OS UNIX development.

The zopen community accelerates modernization efforts on the mainframe, making it easier for companies to adapt z/OS to the latest development standards, especially with the growing adoption of DevOps and CI/CD pipelines. This community also helps reduce the learning curve and complexity of z/OS environments by providing ready-to-use, familiar open source tools, improving developer productivity and enabling faster deployments.

"The zopen community is focused on driving z/OS to the forefront of open source by empowering users to contribute, collaborate, and collectively shape its future, making it a more modern platform for everyone," said Igor Todorovski, Chair of the zopen community and z/OS Open Source Development Lead at IBM. "Joining the Open Mainframe Project allows us to offer these resources to a broader open source ecosystem that will strengthen the developer experience."