Major open source vendors on Monday called for financial companies to contribute more code to the open source community.
"How many here have open source developers working at their company?" Carl Drisko, Novell's Linux and open source principal, asked the audience during a panel at the Linux on Wall Street conference in New York. Relatively few members of the audience raised their hands, to which Drisko said: "It's pretty rare, the number of folks on the Street [Wall Street] that are making major contributions back. They are consumers of open source, but are not necessarily sharing well. We wish there were more that were going on."
In a separate talk at the conference, Larry Ryan, the director of worldwide financial services at HP, made a similar comment on the lack of open source code contribution by the financial community.
"We've not seen a lot of participation yet from [the financial] community — I would be interested to hear your opinion on why that is," he said to the audience.
Banks are generally reluctant to collaborate with other members of the financial community as they are worried about giving advantages to competitors, Ike Garrido, the director of blade server vendor Egenera, said during the panel discussion.
"What we've found is that our clients [in the financial industry] are ruthless — they want a competitive advantage," said Garrido. "I don't see them playing nice."
Concerns over competitive advantage mean that it can be difficult to persuade companies to share code with the open source community, as it can then be easily accessed by competitors. But for technologies that have little impact on competitive advantage, financial companies could probably be encouraged to contribute code, the conference panel agreed.
Brian Behlendorf, the founder of development software vendor CollabNet, pointed out that if companies keep their bug fixes private, the next mainstream version of the product may not include their bug fix, meaning they would have to patch the system again manually.
"If you're using open source technology on Wall Street, unless you're completely reliant on a vendor to provide a certified version, you will probably invest extra time to fix it," he said. "What will you do with your fix? You can keep it to yourself, but if you move it upstream by passing it on to the vendor or submitting it as a patch, you know it will be available in the next version of the product. That's what drives most open source development — collective self-interest."
Behlendorf also said that if companies are spending a lot of money maintaining a piece of software in-house that does not give them much competitive advantage, they could save costs by releasing the source code or migrating to an open-source equivalent.
Although the financial industry seems to be particularly reluctant to participate in open source communities, Novell's Drisko said any industry sector that is highly competitive is likely to be equally reluctant.
"A lot of other industries are doing a whole lot better in terms of collaborating, but most are not competitive," he said. "For example, there are initiatives to make government systems open source and there is a lot of collaboration between universities. But the closer it comes to affecting the dollar, the less you will see people participating."
Talkback
They make juicy targets for software patent holders too. I wouldn't be surprised if they fear that open source would make them easier ones.
Banks employ a lot of highly paid developers and programmers. If banks use more open-source infrastructure software and more applications are developed on it, then open-source will be take-off ! This is good for the open-source community as bank will be looking for people with the relevant skills and not just MS-certified engineers. Sometimes we may need to move away from just contributing codes. Contributing to the overall 'open-source' economics is probably more important.
Capitalists giving something away. - Pull the other one; it's got bells on it.
Financial companies are major contributors.
It's actually a bit amuzing and ironic to read this article.
Financial services companies are major contributors, but they contribute covertly.
Financial companies don't want to expose themselves to the liability of directly supporting open source, largely because they would be the "deepest pockets" and therefore attractive to lawyers hoping to cash in on almost any misfortune involving software contributed by the institutions.
In general, there are several strategies for mitigating this risk. The simplest is to use consultants for the bulk of your development. You can also establish a corporate policy that the employees do not disclose any confidential information to outside sources.
Dow Jones was one of the first nationally branded commercial publishers on the Internet, and provided funding to WAIS inc, who provided the foundation for some of the most popular search engines - this was back in 1993.
Much of the prototyping was done on Linux, and eventually the server was placed on Solaris, and later moved to HP_UX.
Insurance companies have given source code developed by their employees to companies such as Sun Microsystems, who then published it as open source technology.
Keep in mind that financial services companies aren't in the business of selling software. Furthermore, they have to be very careful about WHAT they give away, and also HOW they give it away.
I've been in the financial services industry for over 16 years, and in the IT industry for over 26 years.
Ironically, insurance companies, banks, brokerages, and financial services providers are some of the BIGGEST contributors - they just do it very covertly.