What Wall Street can learn from FOSS

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 07 October 2008 02:36

Opinion and Analysis

If you haven't been living under a rock in recent times, you would be fully aware of the serious financial crisis in which the US finds itself. And as the contagion spreads, in smaller measure, to the rest of the world, people's thoughts often devolve to cost-cutting.
The Linux Foundation has leapt at the opportunity and, according to its executive director, Jim Zemlin, will be holding an event by mid-October to tell the denizens of Wall Street all about the virtues of Linux and other free and open source software.

Zemlin's focus will be on economics. No doubt that is a necessity - free and open source software is not merely up to the job technically, it costs a fraction of what proprietary software does.

But there's more to it than just mere dollars and cents. The way I see it, Wall Street could learn a few other lessons from FOSS, lessons that will help in the long term, lessons that will avoid a repeat of the crisis.

A primary lesson that this genre of software has taught people is that openness is preferable to secrecy.

Openness improves development of software, the principle being that if more people are able to view and examine code, the lesser the probability that there will be bugs in that code.

Or to put it another way, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

Open code also ensures that there are no gotchas in the code - no nasty surprises for the user when he or she runs that sample on their computers. No sneaky spying on consumers without their knowledge.

Openness is something from which Wall Street can benefit. If someone had told a victim of a sub-prime mortgage that his or her repayments would triple in a couple of years, then would that person have jumped at the chance to borrow the money?