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About Open Edition
Unix on IBM mainframes is not new. In the 1980s IBM's AIX/370 ran but failed to maintain sufficient customer enthusiasm: AIX was different enough from popular Unix implementations to require substantial application porting effort. In the 1990s, Open Edition emerged on VM CMS and on OS/390 (Open Edition is generally referred to as USS, Unix System Services, on the latter platform). A shell runs POSIX-compliant applications on either system, with access to host operating systems services. Open Edition has been a successful draw on OS/390, with popular ports including Apache web server. However, on VM, the emulation of POSIX has been somewhat less well received, for reasons ranging from interoperability problems between shell applications and CMS applications to imperfect emulation of POSIX calls such as fork(). Nonetheless, VM enthusiast Neale Ferguson has managed to port several major open source packages to VM Open Edition. Linux/390 appears to be the most persuasive Unix offering ever to emerge on the S/390 platform. Return to Linux on the IBM S/390
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