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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."
This will surely usher in the year of Linux on the desktop!
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.
Read radical news here
I have the same problem at my work. I want to automate and speed up a lot of the reporting my coworkers do by moving the processing over to one of our Linux servers, but Excel is always a problem. Some of our people actually see Excel as a platform in itself. It's become kind of a joke among some of us there. "Excel would make a great Operating System if only it had a decent spreadsheet."
Some of our macros can take upwards of twenty minutes to run.
I suppose they could use OpenOffice-server, and I've considered playing around with it, but it seems like too much unnecessary overhead. Right now I think I'm gonna give JExcelAPI a whirl as soon as I get a break in between projects.
Are your friends still employed?
I would warn potential FOSS adopters of the unintended consequences of their altruism: you might be out of your job.
When you spend $2M for software licensing fees, $500k for IT staff doesn't look bad.
When you spend $0 for software, $500k for staff starts to look like a good cost-cutting target for that asshole PHB exec!
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.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Best joke today...
And Linux will never replace mainframes. Nothing will.
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).
OTOH, I know companies that are still running their websites and outward-facing interface systems on hardware and software that could be easily replaced by off-the shelf open source stuff, which will probably save them a lot of money.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
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?
The article includes a lot of confusion and/or FUD about licensing.
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.
Find free books.
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!
Caveat Utilitor
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.
.Net, since that goes pretty well with everybody's WinXP environment.
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
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
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The kind of use they're talking about isn't really about quants and their modeling. It's about transactional throughput, enterprise messaging, and the guaranteed delivery of various business events (along with the relevant data) to a wide variety of systems across front, mid, and back office domains within a very constrained time window.
As for quants, they often like Linux for a completely seperate reason, specifically because they can use it for Shadow IT purposes without the IT department getting all pissy. Also, many of their favored math packages are old school C and they learned to use them in school on Linux so they tend to gravitate toward it in work as well.
At least that's what I've seen over the last 10-20 years or so since quants have become all the rage.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You've enabled the trading of trillions of dollars and ginormous salaries for hedge-fund managers based on volunteer-ism.
Nice job! You really showed the capitalists.
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.
I used to have a position where I met quarterly with most of the major Wall Street CTOs/CIOs. Every one of them was heavily involved in deploying Linux. You could sum up their reasons quite simply: commoditization yields cheaper computing.
All of them were tired of being locked into the hardware that Solaris required (i.e., Sun's vertical stack), and paying Veritas Foundation Suite licensing on top of that. (I mean, come on, no big enterprise shop ever used Solaris Disk Suite as a standard!)
Sure, today you can run Solaris on x86 more credibly and there's ZFS, but three years ago that was still vapor. Sun was too late with them.
The writing on the wall for Sun's big servers has been there for some time. Sun could not afford to cannibalize its enterprise offerings by going whole-hog into Solaris x86, which is why it's always been the poor stepchild. In the meantime, Linux came along, reached maturity, and now anyone wanting to buy a Unixy system can let Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, etc. compete to deliver a cheap x86 box. There's no important differentiation between them, and very few people are buying giant Sun servers any more. Heck, Sun's big Lonestar supercomputer sale was commodity x86 running Linux.
Linux deployments, at least in the sector I worked with, were mainly Unix replacements.
Oh, and a couple responses to the above:
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