[dundee] London Stock Exchange goes Open Source

[Rick Moynihan]

2009/10/6 gordon dunlop <astrozubenel at googlemail.com>:
> The LSE has recently bought the company MillenniumIT, which is based on
> GNU/Linux, to run their financial transaction systems:
>
>  http://www.computerworlduk.com/toolbox/open-source/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2568&blogid=14
>
> Gordon

Yeah, this is something we've been anticipating for a while!
Especially since their 7-hours of EPIC Windoze FAIL, on what would
have otherwise been the busiest trading day of last year (it was the
day the U.S. decided to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac):

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSL01084620080908

Good to see they're moving on it reasonably quickly....  The claimed
reasons (though bite sized) do indicate a big win for Open
solutions...  As they claim they chose this solution ‘for more
control, less costs, and the ability to build and innovate’.

As these kinda big systems are always an exercise in specialisation it
doesn't make sense to choose a proprietary solution, as you'll likely
need to make loads of tweaks through the whole stack...  This is
something that's just not easy in a proprietary system even though the
stacks of cash you pay M$ will mean they'll be willing to make some
tweaks to the O/S for you... how do you co-ordinate those with tweaks
needed by your database vendor?  The bureaucracy alone would likely
delay such ventures for months.

It's interesting going back and reading the original Microsoft "get
the facts" case study they wrote when they won this contract, as part
of their war on Linux...  What I find interesting is that the original
system that M$ replaced had a claimed uptime of 6 years... 3 years
into their grand strategy and the M$ solution creates one of the
largest outages they've ever seen, and a year later the LSE are going
to be running Linux...   In light of this I encourage everyone to "Get
the Facts":

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx

(I mean that in a very real sense too... as we still don't have the
facts, and we're largely just speculating)

Also thanks to Gordon's Lurker DB, I managed to find a previous thread
on this same story:

http://dundeelug.org.uk/lurker/message/20090705.001125.2a1835b1.en.html

R.