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.'"

Comments

It's a threat!

[gasmonso]

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/

Utilities too

[jdray]

I made the same argument about utility companies. My basic argument is that, since profit margins are regulated, reduced costs mean reduced power prices.

Re:Architecture degredation?

[kebes]

An open-source style of coding doesn't automatically mean that all contributions are good quality. However it does generally mean that you get many more contributions, so you can afford to be picky. Also, a "cheap hack" could conceivably be rewritten by a more by-the-book coder to fit in with the current architecture. In my own programming experience, I find that at least half the battle is just in figuring out what's going wrong. The "cheap hack" probably already exposes what sections of the code are interacting in an improper way. Thus, the code contribution (even if not accepted into the tree) represents "research" into the nature of a bug. This can be useful to the more serious coders.

I think with any large software project (OSS or closed), it can be difficult to maintain the architecture. It's very tempting to accept hacks to deal with problems. As always, the quality of the code depends a great deal on those key people who are in charge of validating code and integrating it into the tree. They have to exercise discipline. In an open-source project, all code mergers are visible to everyone, so I'd imagine that this would be yet another reason why architecture could be kept more stable in OSS versus closed-source (where you could silently add a hack into the code without many people noticing).

Let me see...

[Macthorpe]

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?

Re:Aint' gonna happen.

[radish]

Crap. I work for one of the big investment banks. We use a lot of OSS, and yes, we contribute back in some cases. There are a number of projects which I know you've heard of that we have contributed significantly to. However, we almost always do it under another name. Why? Because if something goes horribly wrong with some application in the future we don't want our name all over it.

We also contribute financially to companies who provide support (e.g. RedHat, JBoss etc).