Wall Street Becoming a Linux Stronghold

alphadogg recommends an article about the rise of Linux on Wall Street. We discussed the beginnings of this trend last year. From NetworkWorld: "Wall Street firms increasingly are buying into Linux, but some still need convincing that open source licensing and support models won't make using the technology more trouble than it's worth. Linux providers, speaking this week at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association conference in New York City, stated their cases that Wall Street firms have nothing to fear about diving into open source. Red Hat and Novell argued that's especially true now that specialized Real Time Linux has been developed that meets strict low-latency and messaging requirements of brokerages and trading firms."

Comments

Re:Not a recent development

[Jimmy King]

Also consider that when something goes wrong with Solaris or Windows, you file a ticket and come out smelling like roses when it's speedily resolved. When something goes wrong with FOSS that you advocated for, more often then not it's your ass. That would be completely true in opposite land. Fortunately, the major FOSS vendors supplying corporate America provide support contracts, just like the non-FOSS guys.

First hand experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a Big American Investment Bank, right in the heart of the financial district of New York, and I can tell you that one of our most important technologies that supports pretty much all of our trading systems and pricing algorithms is run on an international Linux computing cluster. Hell, they've got us wrappers for all the usual Linux commands (grep, cat, pipes, etc) so we can use them in the Windows command line.

However, every single person's desktop is a WinXP with all the usual MSFT goodies. Excel is used extensively by everyone that doesn't code but has to work with numbers. Lots of desktop apps are .Net, since that goes pretty well with everybody's WinXP environment.

Re:Not a recent development

[pembo13]

1. If you think you can get an issue speedily resolved because you paying for the software, then you obviously aren't employed in that sector.

2. Using open source does not mean that you can't buy support, its completely up to you

Re:Wall Street = Sun City. And Big Iron.

[Excelcia]

And Linux will never replace mainframes. Nothing will.

Excuse me? A lot of new mainframes being shipped are with Linux. Most of IBM's supercomputers now use Linux, and this trickles down into to mainframe market as yesterday's supercomputer designs scale into today's mainframes. Linux isn't replacing the mainframe - Linux IS the mainframe.

Re:This is it!

[Flammon]

The year of Linux on the desktop will be evident when Apple makes its first

Hi I'm a Mac and Hi I'm Linux

commercial.

is "Wall Street Journal" a MS fanboy?

[falconwolf]

Ironically though, the Wall Street Journal, pride of the überrightwing Murdoch Empire -- News Corpse International -- is still as M$ fan boy as any good rightwinger should be.

According to this article, "Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg flirts with Ubuntu" Walt Mossberg is in Apple's camp. He tried a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu and he wasn't too happy, er said it isn't ready for most users yet.

Falcon

Re:Wall Street = Sun City. And Big Iron.

[donaldm]

At the risk of being modded troll, OO Calc will probably never replace Excel - other than Suns and big iron, corporate america runs on Microsoft Excel (not necessarily a good thing, but still). The problem with OO Calc verses MS Excel is starting to become like the old "vi" verses "emacs" flame-wars. Spreadsheet users need to get some perspective on what a spreadsheet will do and what it should not do.

Some things a spreadsheet should not be used for (please add too if you like):

1. As a Database.
2. As an Statistical Analysis tool.
3. A complex programming tool.

A spreadsheet is a tool that is extremely good at manipulating data (I believe the KISS principle should apply here) and graphically presenting data and IMHO that is where it should end. With regard to presenting data what I find useful is the ability of OO Calc to display and rotate in real time 3D data, that to me is more useful than having to write and debug complex VB scripts which could easily be replaced with a good statical analysis package which has a proven track record (ie. vetted by engineers and scientists with mathematical and programming skills). The problem you get with people (eg. a CPA/Manager/Lawyer... normally with little or no formal programming skills) writing their own scripts is that the people and the firm(s) who use these scripts had better be 100% confident that there are no bugs in them. IMHO keeping auditable track of any mathematical process is much better than putting in data to a "black box" and just getting an answer.

Once we get over the "mine is better than yours" attitude then maybe you find that there is no fundamental difference between OO Calc and MS Excel since they both are very good at graphically presenting data. Of course the big difference is you can see the source for OO Calc which can be and is vetted by professional engineers and scientists compared to trusting Microsoft's closed source solution see example where simple bugs can translate into millions of dollars of lost money.

Re:Wall Street = Sun City. And Big Iron.

[cymru_slam]

Speaking as someone who used to do computational Physics research and now works as a sysadmin for a major Wall Street bank, I know a wee bit about this. The machines that you see on the Top500 aren't Mainframes - they are HPC boxes used mostly by Universities and other organisations to do numerical calculations. The Cray T3E that I used to use wasn't a mainframe it was a massively Parallel machine. They crap on Mainframes for raw CPU power but with the mainframe it's in the bandwidth, reliability and virtualisation features.