Open Source in Finance Forum London 2025

Mainframe computers are old, mostly depicted with black and white photos of operators loading tape drives or else history boards telling of their use in the moon landings. Despite their age however, they remain the backbone of financial transactional IT, and are undergoing a revival powered by by a large stack of open source languages and packages. This talk will cover how the Linux Foundation Open Mainframe Project is at the forefront of this, bringing test tools like Galasa, Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ plugins from the Zowe project, ports of 300 tools like bash, curl, openssl to give a current linux environment. With languages like python, Java, node.js being on the platform, as well as the LinuxOn Z environment this is no longer your grandparent's machine. We'll show how open source is at the driving edge of bringing the platform into the 21st century, and also how the blend of open source and enterprise computing cope when they meet.