Fwd: "Revolution OS" (The Movie).

[Pete Ryland]

On 20/12/06, Hervé Fache <Herve at lucidia.net> wrote:
> On 12/20/06, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> > Hollywood doesn't enter into it.  How about the world of Wall Street?
>
> I doubt people from Wall Street will ever like the idea of free
> software. The only thing they eat and drink is money, so anything that
> has ´free´ in it is bad for them.
>
> Free software is not about winning, which seems like a motto over
> there. Noticed how ´looser´ is an insult in some country? Not anywhere
> else I know...

On the contrary, you may be surprised at the uptake of Linux within
the banking community, and this has been the case for some years.
Indeed, I don't know of a single financial institution in London that
*doesn't* use Linux.  Some use it a *lot*.  RedHat seems to hold the
vast majority of this market (at least for now).

Here's some things to consider:

Traders will certainly know about Linux due to the large VA and Redhat
floats in the 90s and they would have done their research (although
they may not know how to pronounce it properly).  Bankers may not care
about the details, like whether the software is free or not, they just
want the end product to work the way they want, and free software, due
to its nature, is often able to provide a solution quickly, without
the hassle of acquiring licences (the cost may not matter so much
here, but the solution speed and its security does).  There are a lot
of external products and services used by banks, and lot of these
compete fiercely, so free software is used by a lot of these external
companies to gain an advantage over their competitors.

Pete