Comment by streamofdigits

5 years ago

> Investment banks have a one-way approach to open source software: (some of) it can come in, but none of it can go out

I'd say thats how they see society and their role in it more generally. Doing God's work is a surprisingly directed graph. It applies also to the broader banking world, but investment banks being the most lucrative (when not bailed out) attract talented people that in principle can close the loop and return something important back (much more so than the "sleepy" commercial bank or credit union).

It would interesting if the above (potentially biased) view could be backed up by computing an open source leech ratio per industry sector. The amount of open source code used versus the amount contributed.

NB: a high leech ratio does not necessarily make you the worst offender. If your business model is evil no amount of open source contribution will wash it out

3 comments

streamofdigits

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esonoi  5 years ago

Not entirely true. Two things to consider: 1. Public sentiment. When Goldman Sachs open sourced their collections library on GitHub, it gained marginal traction (opinion: seemed more about PR to attract tech talent). When it was adopted by the Eclipse Foundation, usage rose by a non-trivial amount (based on usage stats from mvnrepository that aren’t other eclipse projects). 2. There was a massive hiring frenzy, and their due diligence regarding IP was non-existent. Garden leave doesn’t compensate for ‘strategic’ systems. Apart from “competitive advantage”, when you have someone as tenured as he who shall not be named, you mitigate the risk of being sued by not making it obvious you’re cloning a system developed for another firm.

Bulge brackets are more risk avoidant than smaller firms, like hedge funds. Today, we have LMAX disruptor and Real Logic’s Aeron (basis for Akka Remote) due to their liberal policy towards open source.

randomcarbloke  5 years ago

it's also not entirely true, I know of some hedge funds that have made significant contributions to open source codebases (including Python)

  • streamofdigits  5 years ago

    agree, its not entirely true but if you look at the size of the financial industry (like > 10% of global GDP) its contribution is tiny.

    actually besides the tech industry itself I can only think of the bio/medical industry being an important contributor (E.g the entire R ecosystem)