Zopen Community Update: 300+ Projects, DNF5/RPM PoC, Ruby Alpha, and AI Workflows

[IgorTodorovskiIBM]

Hi everyone,

We're excited to share another round of updates from the zopen community! The last few months have been incredible, with major milestones, new tools, and a glimpse of what's ahead for open source on z/OS.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed! Your work is what makes this community thrive and reach new heights!

In this update, we'll cover:

• Milestones & Community Growth
• New Tools & Projects
• Zopen Installer - Dev Release
• DNF5 & RPM Proofs of Concept
• Ruby - Alpha Release
• zopen MCP Server & AI Workflows
• What's Next
• Community Recognition & Blogs

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🏆 Milestones & Community Growth

We're thrilled to share that we've now surpassed 300 projects in the zopen community! 🎉

This achievement reflects the incredible dedication of our contributors, maintainers, and users who continue to bring open-source innovation to z/OS.

Explore the full list of projects here: https://github.com/orgs/zopencommunity/repositories. For a full status of our projects, visit the status page.

A huge thank you to everyone contributing ports, fixes, documentation, and feedback!

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🧠 New Tools & Projects

We continue to expand the zopen portfolio with exciting new additions:

• Midnight Commander (mc): The classic text-based file manager is now available! Browse, copy, and edit files easily right from your terminal.

zopen install mc

• z3 theorem prover: Symbolic reasoning and theorem proving, enabling constraint solving and advanced logical analysis on z/OS.

zopen install z3

• p7zip: High-performance file compression and archiving tool, enabling ZIP, 7Z, and TAR workflows directly on z/OS.

zopen install p7zip

• alternatives: A system utility for managing default command selections, now available on z/OS.

zopen install alternatives

• crush: An AI agent that runs directly in your z/OS terminal.

zopen install crush

Learn more: Crush Blog

• clang-format: Automatic code formatter for C/C++ and other languages, ensuring consistent code style across projects. A huge thank you to Mike Großmann for this contribution!

zopen install clang-format

We've also integrated dataset I/O support into major editors like Vim and Nano, thanks to your feedback as we continue improving the experience.

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🧱 DNF5 & RPM Proof of Concept

Big news: DNF5 and RPM have been ported and we now have alpha builds working on z/OS! 🎉

This represents a huge leap toward a modern, Linux-like package management experience on the platform. This effort was started in the summer of 2025 by university students from PES University including Raahithya Jayaram, Rohit Anand, M C Krishna Kumar, and Aamir Mohammed, with mentorship from Sujata Kumari Devi, Sourabh Jain, Tejaswini R, and Jayashree.
We want to extend a huge thanks to Haritha D and Sachin T for continuing the work to get it across the finish line!

What is DNF5? DNF5 (the next-generation Dandified YUM) is a complete rewrite of DNF in C++ designed for performance, modularity, and easier integration. It brings faster dependency resolution, an improved API, and better support for parallel operations.

Supporting Libraries:
To make this possible, we've successfully ported several key libraries that DNF5 depends on:

• cppunit: C++ unit testing framework
• createrepo_c: Generates metadata for RPM repositories
• librepo: Provides access to remote and local repositories
• json-c: Lightweight JSON parser for C
• toml11: TOML parser and serializer
• libsolv: The core dependency resolver used by DNF and zypper

Together, these form the foundation of an RPM-based package management stack for z/OS, a huge step toward aligning with Linux and AIX package standards.

You can install DNF5 now using:

zopen install dnf5

What's Next: We'll be showcasing DNF5 and RPM in our upcoming zopen community guild meeting, including live demos of repository setup, dependency resolution, and package installs. Stay tuned for the announcement!

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💎 Ruby Alpha Release

We're thrilled to announce that Ruby is now available as an alpha release! 🎉

A massive thank you to Sachin T for his outstanding contribution in getting Ruby running on z/OS. This marks another major milestone in bringing modern languages to the platform.

You can install Ruby now using:

zopen install ruby

The alpha also includes support for gem, allowing you to install Ruby packages just like on Linux or macOS. For example:

gem install asciidoctor

This unlocks access to a rich ecosystem of Ruby tools, libraries, and frameworks!

Languages Now Available on z/OS:
With the addition of Ruby, zopen now supports a rich collection of programming languages including PHP, Lua, Tcl, Kotlin, Groovy, Perl, and gawk, bringing diverse ecosystems and development possibilities to the platform.

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🧩 New Installer (Dev Release)

The new and improved zopen installer is now available as a developer release! Thank you to Russell Wilson for his continued efforts on this!

The new installer introduces support for installing directly from local files or custom repositories, along with smarter dependency analysis, pre/post install scripts, and improved performance. It also adds automatic cache cleaning, man-db updates, caveat display, a package database, and simplified logic for faster, more reliable installs.

Early adopters can explore it now:

zopen install meta --release-line dev

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⚙️ Enabling AI Workflows with the zopen MCP Server

We've built the new zopen MCP Server, a Model Context Protocol server that enables AI assistants (like Claude) to directly interact with zopen tools and services.

What is MCP? The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that allows AI assistants to securely connect to external tools and data sources. Our MCP server exposes zopen's capabilities through this protocol, enabling:

• Automated package builds and installations
• Interactive dependency analysis
• Build environment configuration
• Testing and validation workflows

AI Agent Workflows: We're introducing intelligent automation to simplify porting open-source software to z/OS. These AI-powered workflows assist with:

• Build environment setup
• Dependency resolution and analysis
• Automated porting, testing, and validation

🔗 Repository: https://github.com/zopencommunity/zopen-mcp-server

This builds on our Agentic AI blog post and represents our vision for automating porting, upstreaming, currency management, and maintenance workflows.

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🚀 What's Next

• x11 for z/OS
  We're working on bringing x11, the foundation of graphical environments on UNIX systems, to z/OS. This will enable graphical display and windowing capabilities, expanding the potential for GUI-driven tools on the platform.

• Bazel for z/OS
  As a next step, work is underway to bring Bazel, Google's powerful build system, to z/OS, paving the way for even broader modern development support.

• act: Run GitHub Actions locally on z/OS, enabling CI/CD workflow testing and development directly on the platform.

• Mono: Bring C# and .NET support to z/OS, opening doors to the .NET ecosystem and cross-platform development.

• Micro editor: A modern, intuitive terminal-based text editor with mouse support and easy keybindings.

• rclone: Cloud storage management tool for syncing files between z/OS and cloud providers like AWS S3, Google Drive, and more.

and much more! Keep the community feedback coming!

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🏅 Community Recognition & Blogs

Contributor Recognition:
Our badge program remains open for nominations! If you or someone you know has contributed meaningfully to zopen, whether through code, documentation, or community support, you can apply here:

👉 zopen Community Badge Program

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🤝 Get Involved!

The z/OS open source community thrives on your participation. Here's how you can contribute:

• Try the new tools: zopen install mc, zopen install z3, zopen install ruby, zopen install dnf5
• Test the dev installer: zopen install meta --release-line dev
• Contribute: Visit our GitHub repositories
• Apply for badges: Badge Program
• Join discussions: Share feedback, report issues, or help improve documentation

Every contribution, whether code, documentation, testing, or feedback, makes a difference. Together, we're making z/OS open-source stronger, more accessible, and more innovative than ever.

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Best regards,

The zopen Community Team