[1] The project was announced on August 17, 2015, and was driven by IBM, a major supplier of mainframe hardware, as well as 16 other founding members, that included SUSE, CA Technologies, BMC Software, Compuware as well as clients and partners such as RSM Partner, Vicom Infinity, L3C LLP and ADP, and academic institutions such as Marist College and University of Bedfordshire.
[7] In February 2016 the Linux Foundation announced new members had joined the Open Mainframe Project: Hitachi Data Systems, Sine Nomine Associates, East Carolina University, and DataKinetics, a 35% expansion in the overall membership.
It was announced in August 2018 at SHARE in St. Louis together with the open beta release of version 0.9 that contained contributions from[IBM, Computer Associates, and Rocket Software.
[9] In September 2019 Phoenix Software International obtained Zowe conformance for their (E)JES Command Line Interface plugins and REST API extension.
[10] Zowe narrows the skills gap between new and legacy z/OS developers by offering the choice to work with z/OS either through a Command Line Interface, a "Zowe Explorer" Visual Studio extension,[11] a web browser served from the Zowe Application Framework, or through REST APIs and web sockets served through the API Mediation Layer.