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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."
That's exactly what I was thinking...but also ...
... they aren't going to do it.
Banks are generally reluctant to collaborate with other members of the financial community as they are worried about giving advantages to competitors
Most banks (I work at one) are paranoid about lawsuits for absolutely anything (ex: if you wouldn't have shared you source code, that hacker wouldn't have found the flaw, and you wouldn't have lost your customer's information)... and so if they think that it could turn around and shoot them in the foot
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
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
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!
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).
I understand that... but sharing software within an industry eliminates any competitive advantage that software gives a company within that industry. This is *always* ignored by OSS supporters, and I don't understand why competitive advantage is so easily written off. Is the underlying assumption that software simply isn't important or relevant in business?
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.
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.
Any company that is run by anybody with an IQ greater than that of an eggplant that has a competitive advantage with their software will realize that "contributing" will hurt their bottom line. That's just business 101. OSS people should really stop holding their breath.
Simple example for simple people: Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world largely due to their back-end supply-side JIT software. They're not just going to give that away so that *maybe*, some hack will find a few bugs for them. That would be financial suicide, and the shareholders would sue (rightfully) the people would decided to do that.
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.
As if they'd use that!
Here's my version, its MUCH better to a banking person.
000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID. LOVEBANKS.
000300 DATE-WRITTEN. 27/04/06 16:57.
000400* AUTHOR GBJBAANB
000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000600 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000700 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000800 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000900
001000 DATA DIVISION.
001100 FILE SECTION.
001200
100000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
100100
100200 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
100300 BEGIN.
100400 DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
100500 PERFORM UNTIL 0
100500 DISPLAY "I LOVE BANKS." POSITION 10.
100600 END-PERFORM
100700 STOP RUN.
100800 MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
100900 EXIT.
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
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.
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).
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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.