From the 'Solaris and Windows? at NYSE? Ha!' files:

In New York's Financial District, Linux is your MAMA. The Linux Foundation (that's Greg Kroah-Hartman in the center and to his right is Jim Zemlin) rang the closing bell at the NYSE yesterday.

The Linux Foundation is in NYC for their End User conference, which also served as a backdrop for an OpenMAMA announcement.

OpenMAMA (Middleware Agnostic Messaging API ) is an effort to standardize and simplify the MAMA APIs that have been in use since at least 2002. The project was first announced in October of last year, and has now 'grown up' according to the Linux Foundation.

The new 2.1 version of OpenMAMA now has broad financial industry support and add new features. One of those new features, is the cornerstone of trillions of dollars of transactions that NYSE powers.

The Middleware Agnostic Market Data API (MAMDA) is a framework that has support for trades and quotes and is set to be the reference implementation for the entire NYSE data model.

NYSE also has its own Open Data Model Project, which is now being integrated with OpenMAMA to provide a complete open platform for market data.

While the NYSE itself is a Linux shop (specifically Red Hat Enterprise Linux), there are traders that run on Windows too, so OpenMAMA is now reaching out to them as well with support for application deployment on both Linux and Windows.

"The OpenMAMA project represents what all Linux Foundation Labs projects represent: collaboration at its best," said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation in a statement. "OpenMAMA and open source software are accelerating for the messaging layer of the stack what Linux is doing for the OS-level of the software stack: driving innovation to support the largest number of complex transactions in real-time."

So, to recap, not only is NYSE using Linux as its base operating system, but it has now widely embraced the Linux Foundation (and open source) approach to collaborative development. Financial service firms are interested in primarily one thing -- money, but what OpenMAMA proves is that money, open source and Linux can all be part of a profitable equation.





Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.