June 23, 2026
Big iron, bigger side-eye
Open Source for IBM Z and LinuxONE
IBM says open software is thriving on its giant machines — commenters say “at what cost?”
TLDR: IBM says it helped a big batch of open-source tools work on its high-end servers and invited developers to test apps for free. Commenters immediately turned it into a fight over whether helping IBM is useful collaboration or just extra volunteer labor for a very expensive, very closed world.
IBM dropped a cheerful update about its work helping popular open-source software run on its giant business computers, IBM Z and LinuxONE. The company says it spent May 2026 validating a long list of tools — from Grafana and PostgreSQL to Python, PHP, RabbitMQ, and Terraform — while more than 10 outside projects also added support. IBM is also dangling a pretty tempting carrot: free virtual machines for developers who want to test their apps on the platform.
But the comments? Way less cheerful. One reaction basically asked the question hanging over the whole announcement: why should volunteer developers bother? User rdtsc argued that supporting this hardware can mean flaky test systems, weird failures, and extra unpaid work for maintainers. In other words: IBM calls it collaboration, critics call it homework assigned by a billionaire corporation.
Then came the real gut-punch line from throwawaypath, who mocked the whole idea as “open source on the most closed and expensive hardware platform available.” Ouch. That became the thread’s instant headline-worthy zinger: the classic open-vs-closed culture clash, now with extra mainframe drama. The mood was half skepticism, half eye-roll, with a side of dark humor about paying “for every instruction cycle” — nerd-speak for this stuff sounds pricey. So yes, IBM brought receipts, package lists, and cloud offers. The community brought the side-eye.
Key Points
- •IBM said its team validated recent versions of 28 open source software packages and tools for Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE during May 2026.
- •The article states that Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE use the s390x hardware architecture and support distributions including SLES, RHEL, and Ubuntu.
- •IBM reported that more than 10 open source projects added or expanded s390x support in May 2026, including Kuadrant dns-operator, go-simdjson, poof, nginx-opentracing, OpenSCM client, and Terraform.
- •IBM’s hosted GitHub Actions service for IBM Z and Power onboarded wasm2go, go-sqlite3, and NumPy for testing infrastructure support.
- •The Open Mainframe Project Mainframe Software Hub for Linux added builds for InfluxDB 3 Core and MySQL, updated Spire and Beats, and IBM promoted developer access through the LinuxONE Community Cloud and project VM applications.