Recently there was a "Open Source meets business" conference in Nuremberg, Germany. Excerpts of comments from Silent Penguin/ Mathew Langham: The Nuremberg conference was split into 6 parallel industry focussed tracks. In the financial institutions track, high-profile speakers from Deutsche Bank, Noris Bank, HVB and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein outlined how Open Source has become a normal part of their IT strategies. Most of the speakers said that Open Source is now treated no differently from proprietary solutions when it comes to the evaluation of what should be used for a particular solution. They also stressed the point that the licensing cost (or lack of) is not a killer argument for large banks, as the costs of running and maintaining the solution are in the end far higher. Why are financial institutions moving to Open Source? The arguments given in the conference were no big surprise to anyone who has been involved in Open Source for the last few years: freedom of choice, being able to adapt and change the software, support for standards, flexibility, better quality through the open development process and the possibility of community involvement - to name a few. The last advantage was a major discussion point in the evening panel discussion of the financial track. Listening to the various speakers, it was clear that there are currently two distinct groups. On the one side, the institutions that try to play some active role in the Open Source community and on the other side the institutions who are pleased to be able to profit from Open Source, but who consider themselves to be outside the community. This group of financial institutions voiced their expectations of how "the community should get its act together and make Open Source more enterprise ready". Or as one of the speakers put it: "We want to run our IT infrastructure as economically as possible - we're not interested in ideological discussions". Source: Infoworld.

Prashanth RaiTag(s): open+source