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Community Calls For OSS Contributions by Banks
Erikson Wright writes to mention a ZDNet article, covering a call by open-source vendors to banking institutions. The groups are asking powerful financial firms to contribute more code to the open source community. From the article: "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 ... '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.'"
How long before the US government classifies this as a "National Security Risk" and bans the use of opensource in the banking industry?
http://religiousfreaks.com/As well they should. Contributing to open source is very beneficial and would only draw a longer income merchant which for a bank is the bread and butter of business.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Wanted: Open-source code from banks
By Ingrid Marson, ZDNet UK
Thursday , April 27 2006 10:42 AM
Major open-source vendors on Tuesday 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.
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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, director of worldwide financial services at Hewlett-Packard, 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.
Competitive-advantage concerns
"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."
The Banking industry is the largest group of selfish people I have ever met. Anything they do internally is kept there for fear of giving anyone any kind of edge or leg-up.
It's to the point that they act almost paranoid that everyone is out to get them.
more code is good code..
though, just noticed the other day that MS seems to have some "code-sharing" initiative they have done..
though, for some reason I cannot seem to force myself to download *any* of it..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
NO!
Thanks for donating though.
This is true in many, many industries. Working on a common code base for the good of all helps companies leverage each other's abilities to get more work done on fewer resources. Many developers don't realize it, but that's what projects like Apache are all about. Thousands of companies may need web servers or Office Document libraries, but these programs are beyond the resources of any one company to maintain.
I can't find it anymore, but Scott McNealy wrote a very good piece on Open Sourcing and industry collaboration. His key point was that anything that does not give your company a competitive advantage is not worth maintaining individually. The only time you should waste the resources on solely developing a technology is when it puts you ahead of your competitors. To use the banking industry as an example, there's no need for everyone to write their own accounting packages. There's very little you're going to gain over your competitors. However, a market analysis package that contains proprietary formulas for market predictions and benchmarking is most certainly worth keeping private. The information contained in the software can give you a huge advantage over your competitors.
So in short, it's all about spending your resources wisely. Open Source and Industry Standards just happen to be tools that help companies do that.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Here's one thing I've wondered about OSS projects - how do you prevent architecture degredation? What I mean is, how do you stop people from making cheap hacks to fix their immediate issue in favour of solving the real bug? :->) to make source contributions?
And if the solution is to reject their changes into the source tree, what incentive is there for banks (see, I'm tying it into the article
I am the maverick of Slashdot
I made the same argument about utility companies. My basic argument is that, since profit margins are regulated, reduced costs mean reduced power prices.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
How can you fire programmers for a group failure? Normally a sacking that
quick only results from gross misconduct. How can any individual coder
be accused of gross misconduct for a bad product arising from a TEAM effort?
Unless management went through the code module by module and tallied up the
bugs in each and fired anyones who tally when over some limit. Even so, I
feel some lawsuits gestating if this really is true (and not simply journo
hype).
but I don't think TFA meant that sort of code!
Congrats - you made me smile - and waste even more of my working day on /.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
The same banks that use ActiveX-laden websites? You sure they'd be down with this?
So, the question is: How can you show that it will save them money to give back to OSS?
If they give back to OSS, it means that they won't have to continually re-integrate their changes into the core. In addition to saving them the obvious expense of the insertion, it also saves them the expense if the core has changed in some way that makes their "enhancement" incompatible. In this later case, they could be looking at a rather large expense in upgrading their systems.
So, I work for a bank, and my group wrote a system admin-related utility that we use on a couple thousand systems. Commercial equivalents would cost $200-$500+ per server, provide marginally more functionality, and be less reliable.
If we open-sourced this, we could get free bug-reports and maybe patches. OTOH, our competitiors would get access to it, and we might get sued by some idiot who has a patent that might be intepreted to be violated by this (I can't imagine how - there's no rocket science here - but who knows).
Nobody wants to deal with legal and upper-managment to push that, so it's not going to happen. If we were using an outside-developed package, I think we would push our fixes back, but YMMV.
But especially in the systems management space, the market is insanely inefficient. There's room for several open-source category-killers al la Apache here, I think.
Looking at the european trading scene for example. These guys don't even tell their software vendors how exactly they use their products. That is after all kinds of non disclosure contracts have been signed...
So I do not see this happen, very little companies in this branche will see any tool (software, procedure or whatever) as being non essential to having their own edge.
Banks are absolutely horrible. They are mean skinflints and will never give anything to anybody, for any reason. Give source code out, for free? Come on, they won't even loan money to black people.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That's what it comes down to. If you are in a compettitve market, you need an edge, something you have that your competitors don't, that gives you more strength in your industry. Open source is great from a bottom line standpoint -- who doesn't want to save money on software? -- but it leaves a company wondering if anyone else could do the same things with it. So paranoia is bred. We keep our things in-house and don't let anyone see it. That's why when you are in tech and you leave a financial firm, you have to sign a non-competitiveness agreement and/or a non-disclosure agreement. They don't want your knowledge going somewhere else where it could benefit a competitor.
As long as there is a competitive advantage to be gained, major banks and financial firms will not contribute back to the OSS community if there's even the slightest possibility it will cause them to lose that advantage. It's their corporate culture and I don't think it'll change anytime soon.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The mere existance of OSS products is almost a trade secret. Although the OSS community is big, there is an even bigger community that is OSS-ignorant.
Competitors have no idea that my company is largely based on open source. They continue to overspend and underdeliver, thanks to their choice of canned packages, consultants, and internal development. They seem to think that the only choices are "buy" and "build". OSS is the third option. Of course, you have to bring something to the table, such as the ability to deal with the non-trivial installation and support issues that you get with OSS. Well-rounded, standards-based IT people can do this. Fortunately for me, there are plenty of one-dimensional folks who are limited to evaluating glossy brochures and glitzy sales demos.
When we patch an OSS product (not all that often), we quietly share the solution. If we see a question on a blog and know the answer, we respond. But most of our customizations are useful only to people who use the products within our industry. Even then, most of what we do is oddball stuff that nobody else would want. Besides, I have to keep quiet about our specific uses of OSS because it gives us a low-cost competitive edge.
You can almost always outperform the competition if you are willing to outspend them. But if you can use OSS to outperform them and underspend at the same time, now that's useful.
Banking industry or not, don't expect some middle-aged Director or CIO to stick their neck out at the next board meeting and say, "lets share everybody! c'mon!".
Its going to start with some techs, at the bottom, grumbling about having to apply the same patch *again* because the fix didn't make it into the latest release. When the Marketing Director wonders why initiative X has to be postponed, and its because of this redundant patch cycle, they'll table it and give it due consideration. If the process continues, and it's having an impact on productivity, you'll see something start to happen.
I'm surprised none of the big financial representatives of some of the major open source players haven't considered jumping on the "we're open source too!" PR bandwagon in order to wrangle in more like-minded corporate accounts.
body massage!
Bank's are less concerned about contributing code to OSS and far more concerned with intellectual property issues that surround OSS and the wave of software patents emerging.
Getting OSS "news" from zdnet makes me feel like I need a shower.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
I had a roommate in the Army who said he *loved* to clean and for me not to worry about it, he would do all the cleaning. Okay, cool by me. Later when I was transferred from that base to another, he complained to a sergeant that I would never help clean our room/bathroom. As a punishment for my being stupid enough to take my roommate up on his offer, I was made to scour the place from top to bottom before I could leave.
My take on this is: Don't offer to freely share your software and then complain that there is no reciprocal sharing later. You did not freely share. If financial institutions are honoring the applicable licenses for the software they are using then leave them alone. Otherwise your offer was disingenuous and you become an asshole like my roommate turned out to be. If you can't sleep at night because there is no sharing in return, change the license and quit belly-aching about it because not everyone is going to get caught up in the spirit of open source software the way you would like them to.
It's not greed, it's simply red tape. In a bank I worked some students programmed a tool during work time as part of their training. The code was good and the students wanted to opensource it. As the project was done during work hours the software was owned by the bank. So the decision to opensource it went up to the management board who (after half a year or so) sent it to the corporate lawyers. These needed another half year and lots of meetings to be explained what software is and what open source is and finally decided the bank couldn't take the risk of liability for the software (GPL was not enough for the lawyers). So it went up to the board again who canceled the opensource plans.
Having worked for one of the top 10 largest banking in the US, and having been through several acquisitions, I can offer a good perspective on Open Source in a banking environment.
Most banks simply do not run open source. How can they contribute when they are not even using open source. The reason is that the banking industry is HIGHLY regulated, so the legal and audit departments have full vetoes. When a large project is green lighted it must first go through legal and audit review, there is no way they will allow an open source product, the legal waters are still very murky.
Most technology employees in the bank do not have any open source background, they might play around, but the moment a manager sees it, the project will get scrapped. Any technology not approved by an oversight commitee is not allowed.
The bank I worked for bought out another bank, that bank had one application running on a RedHat server. That machine was literally the first thing to go. Banks are usually very far behind the technology curve, very technology phobic, and very reluctant to spend money on technology products.
Openadaptor was open-sourced by investment bank DrKW in 2001
"openadaptor is a Java/XML-based software platform which allows for rapid business system integration with little or no custom programming.
openadaptor can be loosely classified as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) software. It is highly extensible and provides many ready-built interface components for JMS, LDAP, Mail, MQ Series, Oracle, Sybase and MSSQL Server as well as data exchange formats such as XML. New components are regularly added."
See also this story from slashdot in 2001.
Disclaimer (not that it matters): I was involved in the launch in 2001
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
I've worked in both banks and credit unions for awhile now.
I can understand Banks inherent unwillingness to contribute to OSS. I don't agree with it, but the culture is very averse to collaboration with anyone or anything outside the bank.
Credit unions, on the other hand, love to collaborate all over the place. They share ATMs, branches, information...all sorts of stuff. However, when it comes to things technology (core processing, etc), they share many of the same fears and behaviors as banks.
CU's have many of the same core values that OSS has. I've often wondered why 15 or so don't band together and create a full open source environment from the ground up. It would benefit members at the bottom line, as well as give the CU world important flexibility in competing with banks. Properly, executed, of course.
Are they modifying code, distributing it and not respecting the terms of the license? I thought OSS was supposed to be "free as in speech" AND "free as in beer." So... why is anyone expecting them to give code and money back now? It's one thing to ask them politely for donations to help pay for the development, or to request services like 0% interest loans for development groups that support them, but what's up with this welfare baby entitlement mentality?
Don't give your code away if you intend to try to squeeze code or money out of them later. The time to ask for an equitable exchange is when things get started, not well after you've given them the product with no notice that it'll cost them anything and then try to squeeze some cash out of them. This is to OSS, what try to tax used CD sales is to the RIAA.
I'd call it outrageous, were it not for the hypocrisy and downright idiocy of much of the "community." I can't even count the number of times that the "community" (as opposed to the developers and sincere, committed supporters who actually had basic social skills) has acted counter to OSS interests in front of me and those I know be it at school, online or at work. Imagine being called a "fucking idiot" by the local Linux know-it-alls back in 2000 because you think that BeOS was a far more sophisticated desktop than Linux with KDE 1.0. Please, someone tell me how the "community" is typically something more than a mob.
Not sure if banks are willing to donate code, but here's my new open source project:
10 HOME
20 PRINT "I LOVE BANKS!"
30 GOTO 20
If that's useful to someone's ego (who works in a bank) and willing to contribute in cash, call me.
Thanks for your attention.
Anyone have any info on what happened to AMQ? Was supposed to be an OS messaging middleware sponsored by JPMC...
7 251
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/08/19
...with Eddie Murphy as Whiteman? HAHAHAHA! going into the bank for a loan, riding the city bus with the stewardesses and champagne? More HAHAHAHA one of the better ones
You have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. You think you know how a bank works? Dream on dude...
I saw this article yesterday and I call flame-bait.
What "Major open source vendors"? HP and Novell. 2. And those major vendors weren't calling on all banks to contribute more code, they were suggesting that firms on WALL STREET (the entire financial services industry, not just banks) could get more from Open Source if they were more open about what they used and what they wanted. The entire article is a subtle spin to paint OSS as victims and the entire financial services industry as pack of wolves. And that picture is simply wrong.
Plenty of financial firms USE OSS, and are doing more and more of it, but they don't contribute because THEY DON'T WRITE CODE! They're users. They don't do a lot of custom code because they don't need it, and what they need is very much a secret. They pay HP and Novell (or more likely Red Hat and IBM) to do that code work, and hire unix and linux admins to do their in house work. There's no conflict or bad feelings involved, except by ZDnet who's trying to stir up a controversy that doesn't exist.
I call "BAH!"
Let me play Devil's Advocate.
Why should my bank spend my invested money giving out free code to people I don't do business with?
I'm not just talking about some sort of obligation to the common good, because, lets face it, when did a bank ever act for the common good?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
If you are a quant working in Quantitative Finance, you might be interested in using QuantLib: http://www.quantlib.org./ This is BSD licensed.
If you do use it, please consider contributing to it.
I have already formally bitched at my bank for using diebold ATMs and their software. I explained about black box voting, the *real* shady background of that company, the obvious glaring errors and outright crooked-looking stuff that has gone on there and told them to think about it if that was the sort of company they wanted mucking about with everyone's money. Someplace somewhere it is now on the record, they have been "warned" by a customer of potential bad security with their software they use. Probably not much of an impact, but I am one guy, doing one guys "overseeing" of my miniscule business relationships. A couple of other businesses have also gotten an earful when I went to their online sites and found that to access you were required to use IE, meaning you had to have windows or an older Mac system to access. Sorry, but windows OS and IE browser is the least secure package out there right now, REAL bad, and not a great confidence booster. there would be a better PR for them if they at least "allowed" more secure browsers. Granted, again, not much of an impact from one person, but that is how you build momentum. Hmm, radio shack, I would always bitch LOUD, so that other customers would also get a little nudge into not "eating it" at the counter, whenever they wanted my full information just to purchase some cheap crap there, always made a slight scene at the counter, made them look mean and stupid. I would tell the clerk I know it wasn't his fault, but this was the only place I could complain, that they didn't need to datamine their customers all the time. I know a lot of people did that and eventually they relented and stopped requiring your name phone number and address just to buy a few things. Another one, CD music disks that won't play in computers, complained about that as well to several retailers. Another one, I was part of the boycott Kmart until they dumped that gross moron and anti second amendment dweeb, rosie odonnel, as a spokescreature, that eventually worked, because enough people did it and followed through.
There IS PR in customer complaints and suggestions, from specific code bogusness to business practices to who knows what, it just takes critical mass and voting with your wallet..There is a huge "disinvestitutre" effort or investment effort for stock buying when it comes to businesses in general, several funds are now setup to precisely pick stocks based on various criteria, such as how they treat their workers, how green they are,etc.
Using open source code could eventually be a criteria. Look at GM, loses billions a quarter,BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, *then* decides to drop *15 billion dollars* on a lot of closed source stuff! That was just from a couple months ago. They won't be getting my loot for a new car anytime soon! That was money they could have used to actually engineer, prototype and start ptoduction of perhaps a new diesel electric plug in hybrid or something, but NO, had to fork it out for closed source crap that most likely doesn't even work that well. If I was a big big rich shareholder I would be frothing at the shareholders meetings over it, along with my lawyers. That's just way way way way too much money to drop on software, it just is, over the top. You could *start from scratch* and develop your entire corporate stack for that much money. Now if they had announced that instead of dropping 15 billion on that that they would go into a holding pattern and drop 5 billion (whatever) billion on starting to switch to open source and actually hired a lot of FOSS devs, it WOULD make the press BIGTIME and it WOULD be good PR. If a major bank did that I would switch accounts, because I know they would valuie a penny then. GM could have used the other 10 billion to MAKE BETTER CARS.
Look at todays huge oil price jumps and whatnot. I will go out of my way to try and only get citgo or BP gas instead of exxon for instance, although they are similarly priced at the pump, BP dumps a huge amount of their profit into alternative energy proje
AFAIK most banks using Linux use either RHEL and/or some expensive IBM hardware with support agreements. This is one of the reasons why Redhat and IBM can afford to contribute so much to Free Software community. Numerous Free Software improvements originate directly from Redhat's/IBM's client requirements.
It's not necessary at all to hire hardcore Linux developers to implement your systems and work on contributing them back, you can select a Linux vendor to do it for you. And unlike in the closed source business, if you are unhappy with their technical perfomance, you can switch the vendor easily..
So in some sense, the article is more alarmist than it needs.
However, some banks (and other big institions) end up buying their Linux solution from a really crappy vendor (CA, Accenture, Wipro, EDS, Tietoenator, practically any large consultant house), who lack both Linux expertise and willingness to contribute to community. As the result, their customers get crappy Linux solutions wrapped in propiertary bits. For these vendors, not sending patches upstream is a feature - Everytime their client needs to update the underlying components, they need to pay for the consulting house port their patches upstream.
Now, in future when you hear that a consulting house claims that their customers have found out Linux is expensive to maintain, and are migrating to something else (by ordering a expensive migration project from the same consulting house), you might see through their lies..
I worked for one of the largest banks in the US for several years, and I can tell you that they were in no position to contribute code back to an OSS effort. You see, they are not a software company. They make money by lending money and taking deposits. Software developers and the departments they work in are an overhead cost. The quality of the workforce often suffered and the big bank mentality was to keep substandard people around- everyone is overhead anyway, right? Software was typically developed in huge, monolithic waterfall cycles. Much of what comes out years later was shelfware and low quality. Concepts like continual integration and automated testing were non-existent. Invoking change was nearly impossible due to complex, top heavy org charts. Even if you had a developer or two that was sharp and wanted to contribute to an OSS effort, he'd have to do it in his own time after hours and he'd risk getting in all kinds of trouble for even the mere possibility that he was sharing intellectual property.
It is easy to say that banks should contribute. It is equally as easy to tell a farmer that he should convice his roosters laying eggs. Making it happen? Thats another story.
and the principle is that "It's absolutely free".
:-)
You want something back from them? Here's a toaster. Enjoy.
Morgan Stanley's A+ development environment has been released as OSS, http://aplusdev.org/.
...
It was originally considered a competitive advantage. It's an APL like interpreter, with many interesting ideas in it. Originally conceived in the late 80's, it allowed many people to develop financial applications without having to first master C, Sybase, and Motif/X11.
I'm sure many who have never done a reasonable survey of programming languages will jump all over it being a "dead" language. I personally learned a lot both from the language and the underlying implementation. There is the work of many very talented developers available in the interpreter and the supporting libraries. Many business critical applications were written in it and continue to run. I've been able to use techniques I've learned from that environment in my later programming projects in Perl, Java,
It's not easy to convince companies to open source projects. This release wouldn't have happened without the tremendous efforts of Brian Redman. I believe it cost him quite a bit in political capital.
either they should contribe, or not use any open source code at all.
oooh, so a "free open source license" isn't good enough, huh? Next time you should ammend your GNU license to read something like:
"Pay me $9.99 for every install of this software or submit at least one software patch before my next version release because I lied when I said that all you have to do is provide free source code to any changes that you distribute".
Guess what? I've carefully observed all requirements of the various FOSS licenses for software I use and to some I have even sent money to a couple for whom I've felt especially appreciative. BUT I NEVER WILL FEEL COMPELLED TO *CONTRIBUTE* ANYTHING.
"Community" -- ha, what bunch of socialist wankers.
Its a nice idea, i dont see it happening. the the rules the software has to be shown to comply with change at random, seemingly; and who will fund the testing to show the software still complies? even assuming that theres enough interest to actually implement "this week's" rules in an open manner. Additionally, consider this is an industry happy to pass your data around in big juicy blocks using ActiveX, IE, and self-signed certs (if theres any encryption at all); theres a considerable clue deficiency to overcome before something decent could be sold.
I do work for one of the nation's (U.S.) largest insurance companies (read: paying money) and the major reason why they won't touch open source is liability. They want the ability to point to a vendor or software maker and say, "Their fault!" if something goes drastically wrong.
Interesting. I wonder how common this is? Perhaps the problem with banks not donating code back is exagerated, simply because all banks contribute back anonymously for fear of lawsuits. Come to think of it, I wonder how much supposedly freelance open source contribution is actually funded by some big corporation or other but not attributed to them because of liability?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yes, WE get the picture. However that's not what the stories about. Also there's something that needs to be kept in mind for all you "Robin Hoods" out there who feel that it's OK to sneek things in. The financial industry is right up there with healthcare as one of the most regulated industries out there. It's very easy to get your balls in a sling if you're not careful.
and the author of this article is apparently completely unaware of that. Banks get audited, fairly often, by the government and other regulating bodies. They are told what they MUST have and what they MUST run. They have very little choice in software, hardware, and so many incredibly stupid little things that it's obnoxious in some cases.
Do you really think a bunch of non-technical buearacrats are going to allow banks to just switch to open source? Please, get real! If you want banks to use OSS then you have to get it approved by the regulators first.
Good luck with that.
Are you serious? Even ignoring your racial comment, your post is still woefully mis-informed.
:)
I work for an investment bank and we give a LOT back. We have several charity's that we contribute significant sums to (both Employees and the company). We also contribute both source code (on the rare occasions that we do make in-house mods) as well as support through various channels (irc, web, etc.)
Many very important contributions to Linux have come from banks. Maybe more would if Linux could finally reach the grade of enterprise operating system and be able to handle simple things like the addition of extra SAN LUNs without requiring a reboot. I'm the laughing stock of our Unix team because of that little gem, because I'm the Linux guy
At least that is management's perception.
Banks do not understand or believe that their business is information technology. I work for a bank. I disagree. However, that is their position. Most banks, and there is an exception, are outsourcing everything. Their job is to mitigate risk.
I have seen company policies that do not allow any employee to "directly" return contributions to the open source community. Contributions must be given through a third party and they must be approved. The company doesn't want to risk liability for releasing anything that might be considered somebody else's IP or trade secret. In fact, most banks are now in the patent "idea" business so they are not going to give back any ideas they think they can monetize. Better to be safe than sorry.
Just because a company uses RedHat on their web servers doesn't mean they support open source. It means they pay money to RedHat, a vendor, for their product. That's the way they see it. I'm not allowed to use any open source product without obtaining it through a 3rd party vendor. Seems silly I know. But companies are paranoid because of things like Sarbanes-Oxley.
I'd settle for open specifications of their on-line banking interfaces.
The integrated bill pay is one of the few reasons I keep Quicken around.
Unless you're a shareholder you're not likely to ever get anything from a bank.
Be it slowly. Come check out http://matchable.rubyforge.org/
Screw realty just hook me up another monitor!
The Sarbane-Oxley Act of 2002 implicitly prohibits Publicly Held companies (and companies within one year of going Public) from assigning any monetary value to Open Source Software that they have acquired for free, or to any of the enhancements they make to that free software AND later contribute back into the public domain. Not even the labor costs involved in acquiring, customizing and recontributing the software can be taken as an asset-value (under Generally Accepted Accounting Practices).
So if you build a business sytem worth millions of dollars and you declare that as an asset which increases the value of your company to investors or mergers, you had damned well not have been contributing anything from that business system to any Open Source communi-ty/ists.
...but perhaps not in ways that are so obvious.....
Many of the large firms do have formalized mechanisms for contributing back fixes. Some wind up being rather complicated (think lots of lawyers), but almost all of these companies see value in contributing back fixes rather than hoarding them. Goodness - would you want to have to maintain your own patches off of mainline instead of pushing that work back on the community?
That said, no Wall Street banks view producing OSS as their main mission, nor in keeping some staff around working on OSS for the good of the world instead of the bottom line of the shareholders - that's just not the model. There is general recognition that if you care about a specific OSS project, you've got to put your money where your mouth is. It's just that in this world, its often easier to get a check written than a body hired.
What is a better use of a company's resources - spending $250k/yr on a Linux developer (cost of living is high in NYC) or sending that money to RedHat (or Novell) to support their kernel developers?
Just today I was part of a discussion (with a fellow technology VP at my company) of the form "should we fix this bug/misfeature in OSS product X ourselves, or should we first see how much company A would charge us to do it?". If we go the latter route, nobody will ever know it was us (our lawyers would probably put that in the contract), but the results would certainly go in the mainline either way.
Nobody on the Street wants to bet the business on software from a "community" that has the possibility of getting bored and orphaning software. Look deep inside many high-profile OSS projects and you'll find large companies helping to fund them, often by paying for rarely used "support" contracts from the companies that keep the core developers on payroll.
There was a time when we took a hard, serious look at OSS and Linux as an alternative to commercial software and operating systems. Although we did get a working model of a Linux-based server setup for internal demos, the idea was quickly snuffed out due to fear, not only from upper management, but from many of the customers as well, that the FDIC and state auditors would crap themselves if they ever came across a bank with a setup like that.
I suspect that has more to do with PR and/or reducing the company tax liability than anything else.
However, GP was partly off the mark.
I am NaN
So what, is the money dirty because of it?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.