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 is it!

This will surely usher in the year of Linux on the desktop!

Re:This is it!

The year of Linux on the desktop will be evident when Apple makes its first

Hi I'm a Mac and Hi I'm Linux

commercial.

Windows still important

While I don't doubt that moving some of their infrastructure to a Linux environment would yield nothing but gains for them, the fact remains that a ton of those guys are wedded to Excel. Many have spent years fine tuning massive VB macros.

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

The move isn't from Windows to Linux but from Solaris to Linux. The desktop is, and will continue to be, Windows - so all those backoffice mega spreadsheets will continue to run fine. We're fighting a constant battle to replace them with real applications though - and whilst Solaris has been the server platform of choice for years it's being very quickly replaced by Linux. When I'm ordering machines for my apps these days all I'm allowed to buy are Linux/Intel servers - just a year ago most purchasing was Solaris/SPARC. We even have a _very_ large distributed compute farm which is all Linux. In my experience banks have never been fans of Windows in the server room and I don't really see that changing except for a few Windows specific apps (Exchange & Sharepoint being the big ones).

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.

Re:Windows still important

I work in a bank, and you'd be amazed at the amount of Windows servers that are run. The inter-bank network runs on Windows, all our public facing websites are IIS/MSSQL running on Windows servers. Internet Banking runs on IIS. Almost every internal application we use runs on Windows (except the ones that are so ancient that they predate NT4, and yes we have apps that run on NT4). All the new applications that are being developed certainly run on Windows servers.

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...

Wall Street = Sun City. And Big Iron.

Wall Street has always been home to some of Sun's and IBM's largest corporate accounts. I don't doubt Linux and/or BSD can do the job that Solaris can in some cases (with caveats), but it will take years for that to happen. A "Linux stronghold" is misleading at best, TFA doesn't even support the claim.

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:Wall Street = Sun City. And Big Iron.

And Linux will never replace mainframes. Nothing will.

Excuse me? A lot of new mainframes being shipped are with Linux. Most of IBM's supercomputers now use Linux, and this trickles down into to mainframe market as yesterday's supercomputer designs scale into today's mainframes. Linux isn't replacing the mainframe - Linux IS the mainframe [wikimedia.org].

My big iron. Let me show you it.

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.

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

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).

The problem with OO Calc verses MS Excel is starting to become like the old "vi" verses "emacs" flame-wars. Spreadsheet users need to get some perspective on what a spreadsheet will do and what it should not do.

Some things a spreadsheet should not be used for (please add too if you like):

1. As a Database.
2. As an Statistical Analysis tool.
3. 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.

CTO of Linux Foundation fails to explain the GPL

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

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 [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

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.

I work in one of the top 5 Wall Street Firms. Linux is our default OS and represents about 85% of our server deployments. I can tell you that we absolutely do contribute kernel modifications back to the community - the main reason being that when we find kernel bugs (and we do) we need them integrated back into a vendor supported kernel before we'll even consider deploying them into production.

First hand experience

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.

Congrats Linux Hippies

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.

Yes, Linux is replacing...Solaris

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:

• BTW, all of these shops also had huge mainframes. These are not going away any time in any of our lifetimes. I'm not exaggerating. More transactions run through COBOL on mainframes running z/OS in an hour than run through Google in a day. No one wants to mess with all of that.
• The desktops? All Windows. Someone mentioned that firms still use Excel 97 - very true. No one wants to go through the work of porting the ridiculously massive macro and VBA code. Everyone I've known who worked on Wall Street says that Excel is so deeply ingrained that it's practically the Street's O/S.

Re:Finally, Some Linux News!!

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.

Re:Finally, Some Linux News!!

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

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.

Re:Not a recent development

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.

Best joke today...

Re:Not a recent development

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

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.

Re:Not a recent development

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

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.

Re:Not a recent development

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

Re:Not a recent development

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.