The developer of Hercules, the open source mainframe
emulator, has formed a company calledTurboHerculesto support the product.
Hercules is an open source software implementation of the IBM
mainframe architecture, which has been developed from open source
contributions. The product is able to run current versions of IBM's
64-bit operating systems, including z/OS, z/VM and z/VSE, as well
as its older 31-bit and 24-bit operating systems.
While IBM's licensing forbids moving applications and workloads
from the mainframe, TurboHercules said the product's niche is to
focus on ancillary workloads such as
mainframe education, training, demonstrations, pre- and
post-processing, data preparation, archiving, development and
testing.
Under IBM's licensing, Hercules could be used to provide
emergency back-up if a mainframe site fails.