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

Re:It's a threat!

[neonprimetime]

That's exactly what I was thinking...but also ...

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 ... they aren't going to do it.

Not Just in Banking

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Don't be like an old roommate of mine...

[TheIndifferentiate]

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.

www.openadaptor.org

[The Grassy Knoll]

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