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JP Morgan & PWHCoopers use Mozilla license 48

Posted by Hemos from the moving-around dept.
Paul Cunnell writes "FpML? (financial product markup language), jointly created and maintained by J.P. Morgan and PricewaterhouseCoopers, is a new protocol for sharing information on, and dealing in, financial derivatives over the Internet. It is expected to become the standard for the derivatives industry in the rapidly growing field of electronic commerce. Of particular interest to Slashdot readers is the fact that they're using the Mozilla licence for it. " Somewhat analogous to the SABRE system for airlines - make an open system, so that everyone uses it, and you become the standard.
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JP Morgan & PWHCoopers use Mozilla license More

JP Morgan & PWHCoopers use Mozilla license

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  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    Just the fact that "Company decides to stick to standards" is newsworthy points out what a sorry state we are in.
    --
    "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    But this story is news here. That's my point.
    --
    "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    There are many many languages/specs that have licenses. Java, Posix, etc.
    --
    "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    If I can't compile or run programs written in Language L without the license, what's the difference?
    --
    "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    Nearly all of MS's specs and protocols are undocumented or poorly documented. Things like WINE, Samba, and Office conversion utils are all reverse engineered.
    --
    "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda

  • They aren't sticking to anything. They just created what they hope will become the standard. Since it is pretty much open to everyone, it will likely become the standard.

  • With XML being so popular now, it looks like everyone and his dog will be trying to hammer out standard protocols for everything. It might get interesting... more likely it will get confusing. This is where free software is a very good thing. If these people who create the various protocols will deal openly with the other parties who will be likely to use them and allow everyone free access and use, they will probably prevent standards wars and other unpleasant problems that crop up when more than one party attempts to create such a protocol. They won't have to argue over who's is better. They can just take the best ideas from each and everyone uses it for free. No problems.

  • Actually the thing I find amusing/sad is that I was team leading a Derivatives capture, transmission and matching system more than two years ago in the city of London.

    I did design in using XML and DTD's for all the derivatives we supported.

    That system is (I believe) now live although somewhat cut down from the original proposals.

    The whole thing was definately tied up in very non-open licenses. The company has the standard for dealer confirmations already tied up internationally so it is possible for completely proprietary standards to suceeed (but only for a while).

    Dave
  • Wow, what a good idea! Here I was thinking of designing a financial markup language, and keeping it a total secret, making people sign nondisclosure agreements even to see the spec. Gosh do I feel dumb.

    I note from their FAQ that they haven't published the spec yet, which is too bad. Haven't they heard of 'release early, release often?':-P

  • The name came from the merger in 1998 of Price Waterhouse with Coopers & Lybrand

    http://www.pr icewaterhousecoopers.com/gx/eng/about/press-rm/fac t.html [pricewater...oopers.com]

    if you really can't live without knowing the whole history. :P -CoreDump

  • There are currently 4 major airline resevation systems:

    1. WorldSpan
    2. Sabre
    3. SystemOne/Amadeus
    4. Apollo
  • Perhaps it covers the DTD or some sample code. Personally, I would consider it a bad idea to put a DTD under the Mozilla licence. Forks in interchange formats can be extremely damaging - look at how standard TIFF is! A licence that forced any fork to use a distinct name and to start from version 1 again might be more appropriate.
  • I worked for American Airlines for five years and know a great deal about SABRE. SABRE is a set of packages (RES, FRT, and OPR) that's Reservations, feight, and operations (flight planning and glide down). These system run on an OS called TPF (Transaction Processing Facility), which was originally developed by IBM, American Airlines, and TWA in the early 60's. The packages that run and support American Airlines, travel agents, and freight operation (AA and other airlines) are arcane, character based, written in 509 byte, 1K, or 4K blocks called segments in either assembly or SABRE TALK. None of which is open. They have adopted some EDI standards from IATA (International Air Transport Association) and X.25 (edifact) formats for EDI, but nothing about SABRE itself is open or free.

    Troy
  • TPF was developed by IBM, AA, and TWA and was originally called ACP (Airline control program). SABRE is the RES, FRT, and Operations software that AA developed to run their airline business. They have contractual agreements with other airlines to provide RES and FRT services as well as contracts with travel agencies. The source to SABRE is now the property of SABRE, Inc. Which is a spin off of AMR, Inc.


    There has been no anti-truss suit against AMR or any of it's subsideries nor SABRE, Inc.


    Troy
  • As someone who made a living from SGML for three years, this is actually far more interesting than it is for most people. SGML was just too unwieldy for the mass market in Europe. Although it's platform independent and adaptable, SGML hasn't really taken off. Part of the problem was the dearth of tools that could make SGML accessible. SoftQuad's Author Editor showed some promise, but it's only really notable for forming the basis of HotMetal Pro.

    When XML was in its infancy, along with XSL and the proposed mathematical markup language, I attended a number of meetings intended to evangelise the new standard. I came away feeling disillusioned. Here was a great idea that took the best of SGML and DSSSL, and marketed it towards the newly Internet savvy public. However, the same bunch of zealots that buried SGML in technical obscurity looked set to do the same.

    I think it's fair to say that SGML's only lasting monument so far, is its application on the World Wide Web (as HTML). Great DTD's like the US military ones (pertaining to things like tables and the like) were not enough to prevent the death of SGML as a data interchange format.

    Hopefully efforts like this financial data standard will encourage further use of XML, and bring about an end to proprietary standards for data interchange. No more bloated word processor file formats concerned principally with style rather than structure. The use of XML in projects like the Gnome desktop will maybe adavnce this idea, and bring about a revolution in desktop publishing. Never again will I have to tell a publisher to f*ck off when they give me useless data in the form of deadend Word, or worse, Framemaker files.

    At least I can hope.

    Chris Wareham
  • Come on, now we'll see every new development been announced as "open source", what a cool marketing stunt! Then their server is /.'d while we try to figure if it's for real or just the eternal buzzzzzzz...

    I think eSpeak from HP ( http://www.hp.com/e-services/e-speak2.ht ml [hp.com]) seems to stand more chances and I like it better because:

    -Not "financial" oriented
    -From their FAQ:
    Q. How much will HP e-speak cost?


    A. HP e-speak will be distributed at little or no cost to developers via the Internet. Once released by HP, HP e-speak core software will be freely downloadable from a website. The download will include documentation, binary core code, and licensed source code.

    -There is a whitepaper and other public docs about it at http://www.inter netsolutions.enterprise.hp.com/espeak/library.html [hp.com]

    What about BizTalk (from Microsoft)? Hadn't heard of it until I read it on the HP site (!).


    --
    Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available Fabian Rodriguez
  • Only if I can be second :P PWHC came to my college for some talks, and nobody could stop laughing about the name. Whoever came up with Pricewaterhousecoopers??

    Oh well. I know people who work for them anyways, and they say they're cool, despite the awful name.
  • This seems like yet another overextension of the term.
  • errr, hi fans, three things

    where is the DTD on the fpML site? i know it looks like they are still building the site but i think that they are preempting themselves here. they gottta MPL the DTD, and if they don't it is no standard in my books

    when mr/ms harmonica states 'See the ...' above i immediately was reaching for the URL, i thought everything was online now and i can't find it, doh!

    does anybody (in the enterprise application integration business) want to help me design an Open Source DTD for the exchange of relational, network and recursive data structures? I want to promote interoperability in my industry. After all we are meant to be in the business of integration!
  • Price Waterhouse merged with Coopers & Lybrand, and Lybrand got screwed in the deal for somreason.

    But they pay me well, so I can't laugh about the name too much... :)
  • PwC is not an American company.
  • Plus, its hardly an open system, lots of back doors and secret passages.

    ...Alpha
  • This kind of application has EVERYTHING to do with electronic commerce. Don't be misled by thie high visibility of amazon.com and eBay, which follow the business-to-consumer model.

    I recently came across a stat (source: International Data Corporation, Global Market Forcast for Internet Usage and Commerce, 7/97. Dated? Maybe a little but still very relevant) that showed that in 1996, business-to-consumer e-business was $1.6B of a $2.6B "pie," or 60%.

    By 2001, however, business-to-business e-commerce would dominate, growing to $178B, or 80% of a $222.6B (!) total market.

    That's a lot of B's for companies to toss back and forth. It's only natural that businesses would evolve methods such as this to accomidate their needs more efficiently.

    trichard

  • I think eSpeak from HP seems to stand more chances and I like it better because: [snip] Not "financial" oriented

    FpML is not about brokerage between bid and offer, as eSpeak seems to be. Rather, it addresses an urgent need for banks to speak a common and extensible language when exchanging data with other departments or banks.

    Data in this context means trade details, counterparty information, etc. New financial instruments are born every day, and different applications (e.g. front office system vs. risk management application vs. settlement system) need different parts of that data. XML is extremely applicable to the financial industry, and FpML was just a thing waiting to happen.

  • is it pegasus?
  • I found the site not very informative. However, it states that fpml is based on XML. Moreover, the logo on top of each page indicates that XML-like elements are used.

    To make business work, enterprises must share their DTD's (document type definitions) for new languages like fpml to take advantage of the net. Making it secret would make no sense at all! See the "Share the Ontology in XML-based trading architecures" article in this year's March issue of Communications of the ACM, maybe it's also available online (www.acm.org).
  • I guessed there must be a DTD as the language is supposed to be build on top of xml, but I didn't find it on that site.

    I said that the article was maybe online... but maybe you can get a copy of that CACM issue in a university library near you? It's a small article (one page) combined with a large, very informative article on XML-based e-commerce, sort of an introduction to the topic...

  • ???? (Score:1)

    by twixel ( 30362 )
    Runtimes and compilers have licenses. There can be a trademark on a name, a license on a reference implementation, a copyright on the documentation.

    But the actual language has no license.

  • You could write your own Java interpreter and call it Kaffe.....ooh, somebody already did that and even the super-trademark-protective Sun didn't sue them.

    So, there is a clear distinction between the language and the scaffolding needed to run a program /translate it to executables.
  • Last time I counted, there were four major arline reservation systems. All were proprietary.

    SABRE, WORLDSPAN, GALILEO and AMADEUS.

    So SABRE is not a standard and it is not open. It is a reservation system.

    And how anyone can release a markup language with a license, is completely beyond me. Imagine HTML having a license. Or C.

  • Maybe the specification is going to be in the form of code. It would probably be more useful like that. Wasn't the ISO Pascal standard a program to convert Pascal to C?
  • SABRE is both the standard and a company.

    all of the above use the same language (SABREtalk if you wan't to call it a language, I call it 360 ASM with loop structures) to create the functionality on the same system (TPF)


    I once worked for one of the above and had to write the SABREtalk code to perform queries like:
    A*315atl200lax .... and so on.
    no I don't know what it means either. :)
  • and lots of small, twisty passages :)

  • Well I want to know how they are going to deal with the issue of different derivative pricing models, do they include the model and parameters in the markup language or just the resulting numbers?

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