Community Blog

At the biweekly FINOS Open Source Readiness meetings, we typically feature guest presentations by leading lights in the world of corporate open source management. But this week, we had a break between presentations and took the opportunity to check in with participants on the progress of their open source programs and the challenges on the tops of their minds. It was a great discussion, featuring participants from the financial services, insurance, and software industries.

This post summarizes some of the topics that came up, as well as some great resources mentioned by participants. Our biweekly meetings are open to all, so please consider joining a future meeting! A list of upcoming guest presentations is at the end of this post.

Join us Wednesday, June 19th at 10am EDT via WebEx for two guest presentations for the FINOS Open Source Readiness (OSR) Working Group.

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.

Last week at FinJS London, I had the chance to share the Foundation’s vision for an open source fintech ecosystem. As usual, our friends at OpenFin did a terrific job with the event and I had great conversations with folks from banks, startups, and vendors. Here I share my thoughts, as well as the video of the presentation.  

The Symphony Software Foundation’s mission is to foster the open development of software infrastructure shared by the financial services and fintech industries. And while even the last holdouts against open source in the software industry have at last embraced collaborative development—Microsoft recently joined the Linux Foundation—most financial services firms still approach open source with caution.