This is the public portal for all IBM Z Hardware and Operating System related offerings. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).
We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:
Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,
Post an idea.
Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.
Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.
Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.
IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.
ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.
z/OS is distributed with many UNIX commands, such as cp
and grep.
These commands, in many cases, have not evolved from when they were originally ported while the open-source version has evolved with additional capabilities and features. The z/OS commands do have the advantage of support for z/OS datasets and the z/OS UNIX environment.
It is being proposed that these ports be released as open-source and the z/OS distinctives be upstreamed to the open-source project which would then allow for a single code base and giving the z/OS UNIX infrastructure a ported command that mirrors the open-source commands - something that currently frustrates z/OS UNIX users greatly.
Idea priority | High |
By clicking the "Post Comment" or "Submit Idea" button, you are agreeing to the IBM Ideas Portal Terms of Use.
Do not place IBM confidential, company confidential, or personal information into any field.
I think that open sourcing (is that even a verb?) anything that is endemic to the z/OS base or major subsystems is an interesting idea. However, I'm not sure how this works in the Unix or Linux world...what is distributed with the "base OS" vs. how do people obtain/install/run the open source versions of these utilities? It would be my contention that the model should be the same for z/OS as Unix and Linux.
As an additional thought, you seem to be making the point that the separate z/OS versions of these commands might get updated when the Unix/Linux OSS versions get updated. Wouldn't that argue for having a single code base for all platforms (with appropriate conditional compilation logic) and not a separate z/OS project?
Scott Fagen
Mainframe Evangelist
CDW