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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.'"
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."
Many of the common financial functionality that's not proprietary is already opensourced in the form of QuantLib at www.quantlib.org
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 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.