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Open source has long flourished on Wall Street. But the more dramatic shift for Wall Street right now is that it is considering open-source alternatives for fundamental, industry-specific applications.
Wall Street firms increasingly are buying into Linux, but some still need convincing that open source licensing and support models won't make using the technology more trouble than its worth.
Wall Street firms increasingly are buying into Linux, but some still need convincing that open source licensing and support models won't make using the technology more trouble than its worth.
Linux and open source software are a key component in the underlying infrastructure of the finance industry, but the higher layers of the stack are still dominated by a multitude of proprietary, in-house solutions. A software startup called Marketcetera aims to change that with a new, open source platform for building automated trading systems.
The details are sketchy, and the two companies are not confirming or denying that something is going down, but the Wall Street Journal broke a story last Tuesday, right smack dab in the middle of the opening session of Sun Microsystems' CommunityOne East developer conference in New York, that IBM was in talks to shell out between $7.4 billion and $8.2 billion to acquire Sun.
With the financial meltdown eroding IT budgets, large investment banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions have been forced to rethink their attitudes toward open source technology.
Mickos [Mårten] was recruited to lead open-source database provider MySQL AB in 2001 by chief technology officer and co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius, a college classmate. Since then, the MySQL database has become one of the most popular open-source technologies around, used by many of the biggest Web 2.0 sites.
Harsh economic conditions tend to accelerate technology shifts, so the top brass at Red Hat were a pretty chipper bunch as they explained to Wall Street how they intend to make money in the coming years.
