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:Finally, Some Linux News!!

[unity100]

what you term as 'left wing' news in /. pertains to freedom of the masses in regard to life and internet, what you term as 'psuedo-politics' affects the lives of ALL of us and what we care on the tech world. if many small fights were not won in the areas you so ignorantly despise, today red hat and novell would not be able to make a speech to wall street praising linux.

CTO of Linux Foundation fails to explain the GPL

[Ilyakub]

There's a great fear sometimes, that if I use open source, will I lose my intellectual property?" acknowledged Novell's Levy. Other panelists Randy Hergett, director of engineering for the Open Source and Linux Organizations at HP, and Marcus Rex, CTO at the Linux Foundation, sought to assuage those fears. "The current license for Linux requires you give back any changes you make to the open source community, but there's no way anyone can require those assurances and there's no way we'd know," Rex said.

Excuse me? He could tell them that only changes to the actual code need to be contributed back to the community, and furthermore, that code used within the company and never released does not have to be contributed.

But what does this spokesman for Linux say? That it's illegal but that there's no way to get caught? Does he work for Microsoft?

confusion/FUD about licensing

[bcrowell]

The article includes a lot of confusion and/or FUD about licensing.

"There's a great fear sometimes, that if I use open source, will I lose my intellectual property?" acknowledged Novell's Levy. Other panelists Randy Hergett, director of engineering for the Open Source and Linux Organizations at HP, and Marcus Rex, CTO at the Linux Foundation, sought to assuage those fears. "The current license for Linux requires you give back any changes you make to the open source community, but there's no way anyone can require those assurances and there's no way we'd know," Rex said.

Someone needs to sit down with some of these people and explain to them what the GPL actually says. It doesn't require software written to run on Linux to be GPL'd. Even if you had some reason why you wanted to modify the Linux kernel itself (and why the hell would a Wall Street firm want to!?), you wouldn't need to GPL your modifications unless you were turning around and selling or distributing the modified version publicly.

We seem to be getting a lot of this kind of idiocy recently. Maybe it's good news -- it might just be a sign that a lot of PHBs are getting open source on their radar for the first time. But you'd think that lawyers and journalists would at least get it straight before they published their thoughts on the web.

Re:confusion/FUD about licensing

[RonVNX]

The idiocy isn't recent. Having it come from people like the CTO of the Linux Foundation is though. Eben Moglen or Dan Ravicher needs to sit him down and explain to him exactly what he should have known before accepting the position, or he needs to protest the gross misquoting he got from Network World.

I'm hoping he was misquoted.

Re:Finally, Some Linux News!!

[clang_jangle]

I hope we return to the days when slashdot wasn't so political.

It's these trying times, defined as they are by political extremism everywhere threatening our once-secure way of life. I'm sure many of us hope to return to a more relaxed atmosphere, so we can once again afford the luxury of political apathy. I know I do!

Re:Not a recent development

[Jason Earl]

Have you ever actually tried blaming your software vendor when a project you were in charge of cratered? As a strategy it is highly over-rated.

That, in my opinion, is the best thing about Free Software. You can actually set it up and try it out before you pull out your checkbook and commit to paying a vendor. If the Free Software solution doesn't work, you've wasted a bit of time, but you haven't saddled yourself with a vendor that already has your money. Heck, if your problem is interesting enough, it might even get fixed.

You can always break out your checkbook later and pay a commercial vendor if the Free Software solution doesn't fit your needs. If you bet on a commercial solution first, and it doesn't work, then you have to write off your wasted licensing fees.

Re:Not a recent development

[Kjella]

You can always break out your checkbook later and pay a commercial vendor if the Free Software solution doesn't fit your needs. If you bet on a commercial solution first, and it doesn't work, then you have to write off your wasted licensing fees. With all due respect, you do concept studies and prestudies of commercial software too. Many companies will give you a cheap short-time license for doing a pilot or something like that. Most of the time and cost is spend trying to figure out how your needs are supposed to fit into the solution. Going back to square one with a new tool is a huge setback in any case.

My big iron. Let me show you it.

[symbolset]

The list that proves you wrong is right here

Now go back to the kid's table and play with your toys. The grownups are talking important business. We know you're enthusiastic about today's fad but we don't care. We have work to do and that means using tools that don't have the lifespan of a McDonald's Happy Meal toy.

Re:Not a recent development

[3vi1]

That's true. Being the third largest international company in our field, we've enjoyed this benefit many times.

But... Linux vendors let you do it, no matter who you are.

Re:Not a recent development

[3vi1]

Let me guess... Microsoft made the other components? And, at one time, they used to have competitors.... but no longer?

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

[drinkypoo]

I know IBM lets you run Linux on their virtualized z-series hardware, and they've been selling the solutions with some success. All that is well and good, but Visa's transaction processing systems don't run on Linux, and never will.

IBM sells more mainframes running Linux than running anything else. Several of the top500 are linux clusters (several built by IBM.) Linux is gaining more traction all the time. Why wouldn't Visa's transaction processing systems eventually run on it? Some of the largest and most reliable sites/systems/et cetera run on Linux right now. Why wouldn't it be only a matter of time?