IBM, the Linux Foundation and several other organizations have announced a project aimed at open sourcing mainframe computing. IBM said that it will contribute 250,000 lines of code to the Open Mainframe Project in an effort to attract more developers to the effort. It will also offer free access to the LinuxOne cloud, a new cloud computing service that simulates mainframes running Linux.
On the very same day, IBM announced it was working with Canonical on mainframe hardware that would run only Linux. The LinuxONE product line will include an Emperor version for enterprises and a Rockhopper version for mid-size companies. The systems will support Apache Spark, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Chef, and the Emperor version will be able to handle up to 8,000 virtual machines, the most for any single Linux system.
