What’s Up with Open Source on IBM i?
March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie
Open source software has become a steadfast component of the IBM i stack. But what open source software are IBM i shops using today? Results from Fortra’s recent IBM i Marketplace Survey provide answers.
It may seem odd now, but open source hasn’t always been a staple of the IBM i server’s software diet. Until PHP arrived on the platform two decades ago, proprietary software was the only option for IBM i shops.
But today, IBM i shops have hundreds of open source products to choose from. Thanks to the IBM i server’s openness, just about any product that can run on a PHP or Python runtime, Java virtual machine, or AIX executables (via the PASE runtime) will run on an IBM i server.
The 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey shows that open source software is alive and well on the IBM i server. The survey, which Fortra conducted in late 2023, shows that both open source languages (like PHP and Node.js) as well as open source utilities (like the HTTP Server and Git) are regularly adopted by the IBM i community.
In terms of languages, Java is far and away the most popular open source programming language used by IBM i shops, with 42 percent of Marketplace Survey participants indicating they use it (while Oracle controls some versions of Java, there are also open source versions, including the one adopted by IBM on IBM i). That level of use has been relatively constant over the past six years (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Open source language adoption on IBM i over time. (Data source: Fortra Marketplace Surveys 2016-2024)
There’s a virtual three-way tie for second place among open-source programming languages, with Python reporting a 20 percent share, followed by PHP and Node.js at 18 percent apiece.
Except for an anomalous bump in Python and Node.js usage in 2020 – when the Marketplace Study showed both languages surging to about 25 percent before losing about 10 percent the following year – the long-term trend shows a slow but steady decrease in PHP usage over time and a slow but steady increase in Python and Node.js usage.
Considering how widespread these three open-source languages are in the general IT market (not to mention Java), their acceptance in the IBM i community shows that the IBM i server is, in fact, a modern system that runs modern languages and doesn’t require knowledge of RPG or COBOL. That’s good news for the platform. As the larger IT world moves to adopt new languages like TypeScript and Rust, it will be interesting to see how the IBM i community responds.
As for Perl and Ruby, the Marketplace data shows that they are mere blips, with usage dropping to about 1 percent to 2 percent in the past year.
There are also signs of vibrancy in the adoption of open source utilities and tools in the IBM i community. At the top of the heap with a 61 percent adoption rate is the Apache HTTP Server, which IBM itself has adopted as the primary Web server for IBM i (some customers presumably continue to run IBM’s proprietary WebSphere, but we haven’t heard of them in a while).
It wasn’t that long ago that fewer than half of IBM i customers used the Apache Web server, as a multi-year analysis of Marketplace data shows (see Figure 2). From 2018 to 2022, usage of the Apache Web server surged 28 percentage points, culminating with a 65 percent share, according to the Marketplace data.
However, usage of the Apache Web server has dropped by a few percentage points over the past two years. That could be due to increasing usage of two other open source alternatives, including Apache Tomcat and Nginx. Tomcat gained 5 percentage points from the 2023 to 2024 reports, with 27 percent of Marketplace survey respondents using it. Nginx, meanwhile, has gone from 3 percent in the 2021 Marketplace Survey (the first year it was tracked) to 7 percent in 2024.
Figure 2. Open source utility adoption on IBM i over time. (Data source: Fortra Marketplace Surveys 2016-2024)
Git, the open source version control system, is another open source project that’s gained popularity in IBM i-land. Marketplace data show Git usage climbing steadily from 12 percent in 2018 (the first year Fortra tracked it) to 25 percent in 2023, before falling a bit to 21 percent for the 2024 report. Jenkins, which automates the building, testing, and deployment of new programs and is often deployed alongside Git as part of a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, has shown steady usage at 7 percent for the past three years, per the Marketplace data.
IBM i Chief Architect and CTO Steve Will sees Git and Jenkins adoption increasing in the years to come as IBM i shops modernize their applications.
“It’s certainly the case that more and more of our community is picking up on things like Git and Jenkins and so on,” Will said during the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Results webinar on January 23, which you can watch here. “I think you’re going to see this grow significantly as modernization [grows], because it’s one of the biggest things that our customers are caring about. It moves into, how do I modernize my processes and my tools, not just the application that I use?”
Other open-source tools showing signs of increased usage include Ansible, which was originally developed to be a lightweight configuration management system for servers, applications, networks, containers, security, and the cloud. Ansible usage went from 6 percent usage in the 2021 Marketplace Survey (the first year it was tracked) to 10 percent in the 2024 report.
Open source databases, which are often adopted with pre-built applications developed using an open source language like PHP or Python, showed a slow but steady decline in adoption on IBM i, according to the Marketplace data. The Marketplace Survey revealed that in 2021, the first year Fortra tracked them, 18 percent of IBM i shops used open source databases like MySQL, MariaDB, and Postgres, which run in PASE. But that usage dropped to 15 percent the following year, followed by 13 percent in the 2023 and 2024 reports. (Apparently, it’s hard to beat good old Db2 for i.)
Service Commander came out of nowhere to debut in the Marketplace Survey with a 5 percent share. The utility, which is available via GitHub, helps administrators by providing a command line interface for managing various applications, services, and jobs on IBM i.
Another newbie on the Marketplace list is Apache Kafka. The real-time message bus, which has been supported on IBM i via PASE since 2020, debuted with a 4 percent share in the 2024 survey. Kafka’s capability to quickly transmit any transactional data that lands in a monitored queue into a data lake or a data warehouse destination makes it useful for any shop facing cross-application and cross-operating system data integration issues.
An open source project that’s struggled to gain much traction is Node-RED. The Node.JS-based framework, which was developed by IBM, is used to create event-driven data applications, or “flows,” in JSON format. It went from a 2 percent share in 2021 to 4 percent in 2023 before dropping back down to 3 percent in 2024.
Apache Camel, a Java-based integration framework that’s designed to connect two or more systems, also made its debut on the Marketplace Survey. The framework, which came to IBM i in 2021, was used by 2 percent of the survey participants.
If there’s a mystery in the open source tool usage, it’s what happened to Bash. The Unix shell and command language was showing strong adoption on the Marketplace Survey from 2021, when it debuted with a 7 percent share, to 2023, when it was used by 20 percent of survey takers. But it disappeared for the 2024 survey.
You can download the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey results here.
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