1. Wall Street's Secret Affair With Linux See: "http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-07-17-023-26-NW-BZ-HE";
"Wall Street's big brokerage houses, always on the lookout for new technology that might give them an edge over the competition, are turning to Linux in a big way. While Linux servers could be found on Wall Street in the past, in skunkworks projects or running small, non-essential applications, the recent economic downturn is making the free operating system look more and more attractive. "'There's been a marked change in attitude towards Linux in the last six to nine months,' says Mark Hunt, Global Director, Enterprise Product Marketing at Reuters. Reuters has ported its Reuters Market Data Systems (RMDS), which provides real-time market data and financial news, to Linux. Merrill Lynch & Co. is running RMDS on Linux. "'Every major Wall Street firm has at least a pilot going on with Linux,' says Vern Brownell, the former CTO of Goldman Sachs. 'And more than half of them are probably in production with mission critical applications...'" 2. How a CTO Faced His Worst Nightmare See: "http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-07-18-007-26-IN-BZ-SV"; Q: "Where does Linux figure in your plans? A: "We are in the thin-client space with Linux on the front end. Because we are very early into electronic transactions, we actually were forced to build things that if you started 10 years later you would have bought. We have a set of people who really know how to build this stuff--build middleware for example. If you were starting a stock exchange today, you wouldn't build middleware. You would just go buy it. We have a mixture of bought and what we built a number of years ago. That means we have the technical depth that we can be a careful adopter of technology without paying the price of being late to market..." 3. Russian Government Quiet About its Move Toward Linux See: "http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-07-18-005-26-NW-DP-PB"; "If the Cold War Soviet mindset was known for nothing else, it was known for secrecy. Today's Russian government also seems set on maintaining as much secrecy as possible, at least about its IT infrastructure. This isn't surprising considering Russian President Vladimir Putin and most of his ministry heads are former KGB operatives. "But recently, there has been evidence of Linux use in the Russian government. Earlier this year, Sergei Antimonov, director general of Russian anti-virus company DialogueScience, Inc., said the Russian Ministry of Defense and other government institutions were looking at using 'Open Source Unix-like operating systems' and related software in near future. 'There are three reasons: security, price and openness,' Antimonov says. "Putin may be the stimulus to make Open Source the ubiquitous IT infrastructure in Russia, according to Viacheslav Kaloshin, technical manager, for IP-Tel Company. Kaloshin says Putin is outspoken about his desire to end the country's dependence on Western software production by building up Russian development..."
