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