Napalm Riot

GNU/Linux continues to make further headway into Wall Street, as the New York Stock Exchange switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from Solaris and more GNU/Linux distributions include "Real Time Linux." One of the major concerns for Wall Street companies is the ability to be sure that they will be able to complete trades just as quickly as everyone else; a firm can lose millions to billions of dollars if they can't complete trades fast enough. Real Time Linux has been the answer to this concern.

The other major concern is related to the license under which GNU/Linux is released and the firm's intellectual property. GNU/Linux's current license requires that if changes are made, those changes must make it back to the open source community. Sun Microsystems has addressed this concern OpenSolaris (the open source version of Solaris) by not requiring that companies release the changes they have made. The CTO at the Linux Foundation, Marcus Rex, points out that while GNU/Linux's license requires that changes are contributed to the open source community, there is no way to actually know if a company has made changes, and thus no way to ensure that those changes are known by the open source community.

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