zopen community quarterly digest - Summer 2025

[IgorTodorovskiIBM]

Hi zopen community,

We are thrilled to share a new wave of updates, highlighting major contributions from our university partners and a host of new tools now available on z/OS. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to these incredible advancements!

In this update, we will cover:

• PES University Contributions
• GT University Contributions
• Discover the new tools
• Translation Support
• What's Next
• Badge Program
• Blogs

🎓 University Collaborations & Major Contributions

We’re excited to spotlight major contributions from PES University and Georgia Tech University, where students tackled some of the most ambitious challenges in bringing modern open-source technologies to z/OS.

PES University

AI Inferencing on z/OS

This project brings AI model inference directly to z/OS. The team has updated LlamaCpp to the latest version, adding support for GGUF model formats and z/OS-specific architectural features, like automatic endianness conversion.

They also introduced an example, zOpen Chat, a web-based interface for interacting with AI models like LLaMA 3.2. The tool is designed to help users explore and work with open-source tools in the z/OS ecosystem by searching GitHub repositories and local files. For more info, see the examples directory.

Update llamacpp to the latest version using:

zopen install llamacpp

Thank you all of the students who contributed to this project:

• Namritha Lasyapriya Maddali
• Vaddi Charan Sai Nandan Reddy
• Vyoman Jain
• Neha Sundararaman

Redis on z/OS

The quality and stability of Redis on z/OS has been significantly improved (to 98%), with several real-world examples now successfully demonstrated:

• Write-through caching for DB2: Accelerate reads from memory and enable efficient, batched writes to SQL databases.
• Geospatial queries: Perform real-time, location-based lookups.
• Session management: Track live user sessions and activity.

See the examples directory for more details.

zopen install redis

Thank you all of the students who contributed to this project:

• Prajwal M
• Nikitha Thammaiah
• Motamarri Sai Sathvik
• Sakshi Rajani

Porting RPM Package Manager to z/OS

The team behind porting the RPM package manager has made great strides. The team achieved a successful build of rpmbuild, with work on rpm install functionality underway as the next major step.

Thank you all of the students who contributed to this project:

• Raahithya Jayaram
• Rohit Anand
• M C Krishna Kumar
• Aamir Mohammed

✨ A special thank you to the dedicated mentors who made this collaboration with PES University a success: Sujata Kumari Devi, Sourabh Jain, Tejaswini R, and Jayashree, and leaders @HarithaIBM, @sachintu47, and @sabi789. Your guidance and support were instrumental!

Georgia Tech University

A big thank you to the students at GT University for their contributions this summer!

gRPC

A modern, high-performance RPC framework is now available on z/OS, opening the door to faster microservices on z/OS!

zopen install grpc

Thanks to Aryan Patel (@apatel896) for this contribution.

In Progress Efforts

OpenVPN

Several key dependencies were ported in preparation in preparation for the OpenVPN port:

• fmt: A safe, modern C++ formatting library.
• json-cpp: A lightweight C++ JSON library.
• asio: A cross-platform library for asynchronous network I/O.

Thanks to Bereket Yoseph (@byoseph3) for leading the way.

In-Progress Projects:

• inetutils: This package provides a collection of common network clients and servers, including essential tools like ping, telnet, ftp, and hostname, bringing familiar network diagnostics to z/OS. Thank you to Jonathan Luo (@chrys5) for this contribution.
• stable-diffusion-cpp: A C++ implementation of the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model. This project aims to bring generative AI image creation capabilities directly to the mainframe. Thank you to Akash for leading this effort.
• And a Big thank you to Justin Xu (@JXU037) for on his work on ansible!

📚 New Tools & Libraries

We continue to add more OSS projects to zopen and we now have over 270+ projects under the zopen portfolio!

Here are the latest tool and libraries:

• openldap: An implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
• mkcert: A simple tool for making locally trusted development certificates.
• libsolv: A dependency solver used in package managers.
• jsonc: A fast JSON parser implemented in C.
• libyaml: A library for parsing and emitting YAML in C.
• toml11: A modern TOML parser for C++.
• check: A unit testing framework for C.
• fish: User-friendly command-line shell
• ccache: Compiler cache to speed up rebuilds
• file: Utility to determine file types
• snappy-c: Compression/decompression library
• readline: Line-editing support library
• jemalloc: High-performance memory allocator
• grpc: high-performance RPC framework
• ansible: run Ansible playbooks directly on z/OS
• libpcap: powerful library used for network packet capture and filtering on various operating systems
  ...and more!

Use zopen install <project> to install these awesome new tools and libraries!

Thank you to everyone in the zopen community for these contributions.

🌐 Translation Support

We’re improving multilingual support by building with gettext. For example:

LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 bash --version
GNU bash, バージョン 5.2.37(3)-release (i370-ibm-openedition)
Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
ライセンス GPLv3+: GNU GPL バージョン 3 またはそれ以降 <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

Using the LANG environment variable, GNU based utilities like Bash, Coreutils and more will generate help messages in other languages!

🚧 What's next

DNF5 & Dependency Stack

In our efforts to be more Linux-like and to simplify installation on the platform, we are now pursuing the port of DNF5 to z/OS. Initial work has started on porting DNF5 and its required libraries, such as glib, to provide full package manager support.

🏅 Contributor Recognition

Our new badge program is now open to nominations. If you're interested in obtaining a badge, check out our badge program here: https://zopen.community/#/Badges .

We’ll also be sharing more in an upcoming joint blog post with the Open Mainframe Project next week, stay tuned for that!

Blogs

If you're interested in speeding up your builds, check out my blog on Faster builds on z/OS with ccache

Get Involved!

The z/OS open-source community thrives on your participation! Whether it's trying out new tools, reporting issues on GitHub, contributing code, or improving documentation, your involvement makes a huge difference.

Best Regards,

The zopen Community Team