By: Gilles Gravier, Director, Senior Advisor - Open Source Strategy, Wipro
Free software, open source software, or FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) is still, for a lot of people and organizations, the object of many questions and hesitations. One of the more frequent questions is whether somebody, or an enterprise, can modify code, and, if so, whether they can contribute those modifications back (upstream) to the original project.
As financial services firms get serious about open source collaboration, one of their first priorities is getting a handle on the open source software they're already using. Open source may be free-of-cost but it's not free of obligation: using it responsibly means compliance with open source licenses and keeping current with updates to ensure the products using it remain secure.
Here's what’s happening the week of June 17th, 2019 within the FINOS community. We encourage you to forward this to colleagues and industry partners who may be interested in FINOS and its mission.
Last month we held our 2019 Members Meeting in London, with well over 100 attendees helping to make the event a great success. Presentations included wide-ranging content focused on progress across our 11 FINOS programs as well as factors influencing our community and open source adoption. We were even treated to a live demo of product functionality delivered as a direct result of collaboration between our members. We’d like to thank J.P. Morgan for hosting us in a fantastic (and convenient) venue.
On March 5th FINOS hosted its first Open Source in FinTech event of 2019 at Moody's Analytics Accelerator. Over 100 financial services professionals, technologists, and developers convened to discuss what it takes to build and sustain a decentralized ecosystem. Thank you to everyone who made it out on a cold Tuesday evening.
The centerpiece of the evening was a panel discussion between Patrick Nielsen, co-founder of Clovyr and Dan Guido, CEO of Trail of Bits. The panel was moderated by Rob Underwood, Director of Programs at FINOS. The conversation spanned a whole range of topics including how "decentralized" is much more than just blockchain technology; the new information security imperative; trends in crypto custody; and even quantum computing.
Following the panel, Amber Baldet, co-founder and CEO of Clovyr, tied the event together with her overview of the FINOS Decentralized Ecosystem Growth Program, and the ways in which that initiative provides a useful platform for discussion and development amongst those creating an ecosystem of decentralized projects, protocols, and tools, especially in financial services
Thanks again to everyone who was able to come out Tuesday. And whether you were able to join us or not, we've made the talks available for viewing:
As our members get more involved in open source development, license compliance is inevitably a major focus. But while there's no shortage of information out there about the various open source licenses, it’s not easy to find practical information about license compliance that's accessible to the developers on the front lines of compliance.
To help address this, FINOS has collaborated with open source attorney Jilayne Lovejoy to produce the Open Source License Compliance Handbook, a reference guide to practical compliance information for the most common open source licenses. We're excited to release the Handbook today as an open source resource for our members and the broader open source community!
Scott Logic has recently joined FINOS (Fintech Open Source Foundation), an organisation which promotes open-source within financial services. I thought this would be a good time to share some of my own personal thoughts about the benefits of open-source, and how the financial services industry needs to think more about the community, than the code this community creates.
Open source in financial services is here to stay. It has developed into the default industry computing model. But two questions remain. First, where are you on the adoption curve? The other is: what can you do to maximize the benefits?
