The availability of source code and collaborative development runs deep in the IBM Z community and is woven throughout its history. Twenty years ago, the release of Linux on IBM Z was another step along the way to truly bringing open source software to the enterprise.

As a developer of an open source software project, what does that mean for you? This post provides an in-depth overview of the technical resources available for developers on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

The processor in an IBM Z or LinuxONE is a big-endian computer architecture, and at the hardware level is not compatible with what you may be familiar with if you’ve only developed for x86. Also known as s390x or z/Architecture, the code needs to be specifically compiled for it. Fortunately, you’re in luck! Since support for Linux on Z arrived 20 years ago, dozens of languages and frameworks, and hundreds of major open source applications have been ported. A small sampling of them can be found in IBM’s validated open source software list, with dozens of updates being made each month — and the sea of applications continues to grow. With collaboration in place with SUSE, Red Hat, and Canonical, their respective Linux distributions also release with IBM Z support. Today you can run everything from a simple web server to your latest Go or Node.js application to Kubernetes on IBM Z by simply running the build commands you’re already familiar with.

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