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Bloomberg Open Sources Its Market Data Distribution Technology

Posted by samzenpus on from the free-and-open-market dept.

First time accepted submitter Cara_Latham writes "Hoping to spur innovation and collaboration, Bloomberg LP is opening its market data interfaces to anyone, without cost or restriction. The market data provider's application programming interface (API), known as BLPAPI (Bloomberg LP API), is already used by Bloomberg, its clients and other technology providers to build connections between financial firms' applications and Bloomberg's market data and applications. Today any technology professional, or even students at a university, can access BLPAPI to quickly build connections to market data feeds. The BLPAPI interface works with a number of programming languages and operating systems, including Java, C, C++, .NET, COM and Perl."

6 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Philanthropy by busyqth · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wow this is amazing! Kudos to Bloomberg for such an unexpected and generous gift! Why, now anyone at all can connect to Bloomberg's proprietary and expensive market data feeds. That's what I call true philanthropy.

    1. Re:Philanthropy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The *API* is free, not the data feeds, which means you can create third-party applications without a terminal, but will need one (or one of their appliances) to test it and use their data. So, unless you are willing to open your wallet and grab a few thousand a month, it's probably not that useful for someone that doesn't have a contract with them.

    2. Re:Philanthropy by ZaphDingbat · · Score: 4, Informative

      I've actually contacted Bloomberg to ask about this, and they're not even open-sourcing anything. They're announcing their intention to form a committee to create open standards based on their tech. This is great because it will help fill gaps that AMQP and others are trying to fill, but I'm not sure it deserves an announcement until, you know, there's actually something to look at.

  2. big deal by JimboTheProgrammer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've worked for Bloomberg, and I can tell you they're not doing it for the philanthropy. They're most certainly in it for the money. So they give you the API to build plug-ins or more create a tight Bloomberg feed to your own product. Big deal. I didn't see anything about giving the data away.

  3. The API design is crap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Had a quick review of the API, for high-freq use cases the design is crap. For historical data use-cases, the design crap.

    To add to that, if there is no access to data, even limited access (no real-time or complete historical views), then what is all this fuss about? and furthermore, what is open source about providing APIs? they were already doing it for free if you had an account and asked for it, if thats the case for calling something open source, then by that measure MS as open sourced its entire .NET platform from day one. lots of astro-turfing and shills on slashdot these days.

    I sometimes wonder if the people that design the BB and RFA interfaces are not people but rather monkeys randomly pounding a keyboard....

  4. Open API's vs. Open Source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Open API's are not the same as open source. An Open API allows anyone to create a client to use their stuff, which would be to their advantage. It also allows implicitly allows anyone to try to duplicate the back end system, but that is a heck of a lot of work for which they aren't providing source code for.

    This reminds me of the time back in the '90s when Microsoft "opened" (this was before the term Open Source) the COM/DCOM/ActiveX specifications by turning them over to ECMA (a computer manufacturer's trade group) for "standardization". Then they paid Software AG to port the COM support stack to Unix, which didn't work very well because (for one thing) there were numerous dependencies on Windows data structures such as hWnd and hDC. Except for a few gullible journalists in the trade press, the world basically ignored "cross-platform DCOM", and soon it went away.