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Wall Street Becoming a Linux Stronghold
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jun 13, 2008 07:13 PM
from the quite-an-investment dept.
from the quite-an-investment dept.
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."
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NY Stock Exchange Moves To Linux 272 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Even the old mainframe strongholds, the financial markets, are moving away from big iron. The New York Stock Exchange is one of them, as it's leaving the mainframe for AIX and Linux. They're doing it to save money; it seems that transactions are going to cost half as much on Unix and Linux as they did on the mainframe." The first phase of the transition happened last Monday.
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This is it! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is it! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Windows still important (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Windows still important (Score:5, Interesting)
And I'm sure different banks have different attitudes but we've been all about O/S for a long time now - we dumped WLS for Tomcat/JBoss years ago for example. The biggest hesitation was with Linux as an OS, and that was mainly due to friction from the SA community IMO. Eventually the cost savings (particularly when you dump SPARC) were just too much to ignore.
Parent
Re:Windows still important (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, the actual central processing is not done on Windows, all the mission critical stuff is handled by other platforms, None of it is Linux, though. I'm fairly certain the only Linux servers that run are the ones IT support doesn't know about...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wall Street = Sun City. And Big Iron. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're right. I can't see any way that Linux will ever have anything to do with mainframes. Well, at least no more than three million sites [google.com] will ever mention it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Try to read what you're replying to before making snarky comments.
Re:Wall Street = Sun City. And Big Iron. (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wall Street = Sun City. And Big Iron. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My big iron. Let me show you it. (Score:5, Insightful)
The list [top500.org] that proves you wrong is right here [top500.org]
Now go back to the kid's table and play with your toys [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Parent
top500 != mainframes. Looking at the wrong list (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The list is compiled every six months. It takes a while for the results to be tabulated and validated. New results for May 2008 will be available soon.
The upper pie is based on the share of systems by operating system family. That giant pac-man shape represents the 85% share tux had in November. The Windows sliver represents 1.2% or roughly six or seven systems in the top 500 most powerful computers publicly known, for all versions of Windows.
The bott
Re:Wall Street = Sun City. And Big Iron. (Score:5, Informative)
Some things a spreadsheet should not be used for (please add too if you like):
- As a Database.
- As an Statistical Analysis tool.
- 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 [betanews.com] where simple bugs can translate into millions of dollars of lost money.
Parent
CTO of Linux Foundation fails to explain the GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Possibly mis-quoted. (Score:3, Insightful)
But The Linux Foundation needs to IMMEDIATELY address that with the CORRECT quote or the context.
Either that or immediately kick his idiot ass to the curb.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> code used within the company and never released Yeah, but what constitutes a software "release"? Hosting a public website with some GPL code linked on the back end may spell trouble. Passing out CDs containing marketing materials at a trade show may constitute a software "release". Not every company is a software company, and when your primary business is not creating software you may not be the most savvy about these sorts of things or have the strictest policies about what your developers, contractors, or consultants can inadvertently do. Custom software is a major driving factor in most businesses, and there's an understandable undercurrent of cautious distrust of the GPL when the consequences of the smallest touch could unintentionally taint a codebase.
Uh, no neither of those cases fall under the GPL, both are examples of documents processed by the software which is explicitly called out as NOT being distribution of the software and hence not invoking the clause. It's not that complex of a document to read and understand (the typical commercial software contract is longer, much more obtuse, and definitely MUCH less friendly to the receiving party.) Please don't spread FUD, MS and company do it well enough without your help.
confusion/FUD about licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [law.com] 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 (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm hoping he was misquoted.
Parent
Re:confusion/FUD about licensing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Would that work with a proprietary OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
as in
-as easy to identify bugs
-no problem contacting the right people (developers)
-bugs getting fixed on a reasonable timescale
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
First hand experience (Score:5, Informative)
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
It's true (Score:3, Informative)
Congrats Linux Hippies (Score:5, Funny)
Nice job! You really showed the capitalists.
Yes, Linux is replacing...Solaris (Score:5, Interesting)
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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is "Wall Street Journal" a MS fanboy? (Score:4, Informative)
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" [insidesocal.com] Walt Mossberg is in Apple's camp. He tried a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu [allthingsd.com] and he wasn't too happy, er said it isn't ready for most users yet.
FalconParent
Re:Finally, Some Linux News!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Finally, Some Linux News!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Parent
Not a recent development (Score:2)
Re:Not a recent development (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:Not a recent development (Score:5, Funny)
Best joke today...
Parent
Re:Not a recent development (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Not a recent development (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course you can do concept studies and prestudies, and you should, no matter what software you are using. Free Software just makes that easy. What's more, you don't have to worry about ballooning license fees as your project grows.
I suppose that my real point is that if you are evaluating software you need to start somewhere. Why not start with Free Software? There might be a project that is precisely what you are looking for, and if there isn't, you can always get out your checkbook.
Then again, I
Re:Not a recent development (Score:5, Insightful)
But... Linux vendors let you do it, no matter who you are.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It was cause for us to switch vendors afterwards. Ironically, back to a Microsoft solution as it was less expensive and integrated with other components.
Re:Not a recent development (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Not a recent development (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft, ironically, tends get these sorts of wins as well. After all, everyone has Microsoft software sitting around. It's almost as easy to get rolling on a skunkworks Microsoft project as it is to roll one out with Free Software.
Well done dodging the vendor meltdown bullet, however. In my experience that basically never works. After all, it is pretty rare that a vendor can't point to other customers with successful implementations. Generally speaking when a customer has to flush a large investment down the tubes the guys that chose the tools and then were unable to implement the solution get run as well.
Let's just say I'm not a firm believer in the "throat to choke" theory of choosing software.
My real question for you is why did you move away from the less-expensive, integrated Microsoft solution that worked to something more expensive and less integrated. Nothing personal, but that doesn't sound like the sort of thing that any of the people I've ever worked for would blame on a vendor.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As a practical matter, I've noticed that IT tends to congregate around their vendors, so you'll have a Microsoft group and a Novell group and a Unix group and so on. People in these groups usually realize that they need to defend their vendor at all costs or the other groups will steal their budgets. So there's very little practical impetus to blame the
Re:Not a recent development (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Not a recent development (Score:5, Informative)
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
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
And when you used to spend $2,500,000 on IT (including licensing fees), and you now spend $1M (not including licensing fees), it looks to management like you more than halved your budget (while still delivering the same or better service), when, in fact, you doubled your budget.
Re:Not a recent development (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)