Techs and execs collaborate on Linux apps

In more and more Linux deployments at banks and brokerages, the business side of the operation is getting heavily into the act. Collaboration is becoming the keyword, and suddenly Linux developers find they're being joined by executives.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Collaboration between business executives and developers was the main theme emerging from a panel session at the Linux on Wall Street show today featuring speakers from the Bank of New York Mellon, Software Freedom Law Center, Alfresco Project, and the Collaborative Software Institute (CSI).

Stan Rose of the Bank of New York Mellon credited the need for government and regulatory compliance with originally pulling together technology and business people within the financial services industry.

Now, through a project known as "Bits," the techs and execs at around 100 major financial services firms are working together -- and lately, they've even been taking a look at running end user applications on Linux, according to Rose, who is the bank's managing director for Technology Risk Management.

Eben Moglen, the Software Freedom Law Center's director and co-founder, said that, in his experience, the growing demand for business applications running on Linux and open source has acted as a big driver in catalyzing more collaboration between technology and business arms.

Matt Asay, Alfresco's VP of business development, suggested that business and technical managers alike are behind corporate implementations of Alfresco's solution for "open" document management.

Stuart Cohen, who once headed the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), told the audience that he launched CSI as a way to lower the expenses of software development by bringing together business managers with similar needs to help share the costs of open source development.

But although the open source applications are most often developed in Linux, they are deployed across environments that include Windows and Unix as well as Linux, said the CSI's CSO.