Linux and Open Source
Dana Blankenhorn & Paula RooneyOpen source makes another move on Wall Street
Summary
Bloomberg announced its Bloomberg SYMbology (BSYM) would be available free back in November. That news was noted mainly by insiders. Promotion alongside the New York Stock Exchange is a big deal.
Topics
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Dana Blankenhorn
Biography
Dana Blankenhorn
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for nearly 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the Interactive Age Daily for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age's "NetMarketing" supplement, and dozens of other publications over the years.
Paula Rooney
Biography
Paula Rooney
Paula Rooney has covered the technology industry for more than 15 years, starting with semiconductor design and mini-computer systems at EDN News and later focused on PC software companies including Microsoft, Lotus, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell and other open source and commercial software companies for CRN and PCWeek. She received a silver award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors in 2005 for her profile on Linus Torvalds and edited and co-authored "Partnering With Microsoft," a book about Microsoft's channel published by CMP Publishing in 2004. Rooney graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1997. In her off time, she enjoys scuba diving, sailing, sun worshipping, running and reading. She resides on the shores of Scituate, Massachusetts.
Open source has made its third big move on Wall Street with Bloomberg’s decision to open source its proprietary stock identifiers alongside NYSE-Euronext data streams.
I say third because Marketcetera’s open source trading platform, under the GPL, has been gold for almost a year. A SaaS version of Marketcetera for portfolio management was also released last year. (They must be working hard there — their latest blog post is dated November.)
Still Marketcetera is a start-up, Bloomberg a major player.
Bloomberg announced its Bloomberg SYMbology (BSYM) would be available free back in November. That news was noted mainly by insiders. Promotion alongside the New York Stock Exchange is a big deal.
So what’s going on?
The stock symbols you see in a newspaper don’t fully describe what you can buy and sell. Go to Bloomberg’s site for its open source symbology and input a known stock symbol — any symbol.
What you will probably see are page-after-page of puts and calls, at different dates, on different exchanges, from different sources, in different configurations. (There are 78 pages of these for Google alone.) Getting the best price through an automated system requires that your computer know all the unique identifiers for these securities.
This is a big part of Bloomberg’s “secret sauce.” Until recently you could only get this data through a Bloomberg terminal, using an expensive Bloomberg data stream.
So why is Bloomberg publishing these codes, and in time its algorithms for making them? Are they crazy?
As the A-Team Group noted when the symbols were first released in November, they are crazy like a fox. Here is why:
- Trading is moving toward higher levels of abstraction, with people replaced by computer programs. Releasing the codes gets Bloomberg inside these new programs, and makes its data feeds important in this new method of trading.
- This is a real shot across the bow at Standard & Poor’s and Thomson-Reuters, its main rivals. Both are being investigated in Europe for the monopoly created by Reuters’ Instrument Codes (RIC), the main BSYM rival. Now there is a free alternative. And if you’re getting the codes free why not buy the data?
It’s a good lesson in what might be termed the offensive use of open source, as opposed to its defensive use. Open source can force open opportunities that companies were locked-out of, just as it can maintain customer loyalty for services and support.
I will be interested in seeing what Marketcetera does with this news. With open source symbology and data feeds, open source trading platforms can get much more powerful.
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.
Disclosure
Dana Blankenhorn
Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
At the present moment I run only a personal blog in addition to my ZDNet open source blog.
DanaBlankenhorn.Com has the subtitle The War Against Oil. In the past I have used it to write about political history, e-commerce, personal matters, some ideas related to open source, and The World of Always On, which is the idea of using sensors, motes and RFID to turn WiFi links into platforms for applications which live in the air.
My IRA account at Schwab holds a few tech shares, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials, but there are no open source companies in it. I don’t even own any CBS stock.
Biography
Dana Blankenhorn
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for nearly 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the Interactive Age Daily for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age's "NetMarketing" supplement, and dozens of other publications over the years.
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Related Discussions on TechRepublic
Did you know you can take part in these discussions with your ZDNet membership?Talkback Most Recent of 3 Talkback(s)
-
AzuMao03/19/2010 03:58 PM -
All you get is the right to use their symbols.
http://www.ksvali.com/2010/02/bloomberg-open-symbology-bsym-
bloomberg-open-sources-its-security-identifier-universe/ describes
what you get: the right to use any Bloomberg symbol without license fees
and without having to ask permission. Personally, I would have call this
an 'open interface', not 'open source'. But 'open source' is hipper.
Bloomberg is a master of communication and they chose 'open source.'
They didn't do something radical like releasing their proprietary code
under the GPL.
shis-ka-bob03/21/2010 05:17 PM -
AzuMao03/21/2010 07:16 PM
Talkback - Tell Us What You Think
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