Bloomberg Open Sources Its Market Data Distribution Technology

First time accepted submitter Cara_Latham writes "Hoping to spur innovation and collaboration, Bloomberg LP is opening its market data interfaces to anyone, without cost or restriction. The market data provider's application programming interface (API), known as BLPAPI (Bloomberg LP API), is already used by Bloomberg, its clients and other technology providers to build connections between financial firms' applications and Bloomberg's market data and applications. Today any technology professional, or even students at a university, can access BLPAPI to quickly build connections to market data feeds. The BLPAPI interface works with a number of programming languages and operating systems, including Java, C, C++, .NET, COM and Perl."

big deal

[JimboTheProgrammer]

I've worked for Bloomberg, and I can tell you they're not doing it for the philanthropy. They're most certainly in it for the money. So they give you the API to build plug-ins or more create a tight Bloomberg feed to your own product. Big deal. I didn't see anything about giving the data away.

Release their BLP C++ libraries! Not this junk.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bloomberg has a HUGE set of libraries for C++ that are similar to C++98 and C++0x/C++11 stl, but don't necessarily rely on all the advanced compiler features of C++0x/C++11. If they'd release those libraries, then this would be news. It wouldn't put them at a disadvantage in their market, but it would help gain some respect from the C++ community.

Open API's vs. Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Open API's are not the same as open source. An Open API allows anyone to create a client to use their stuff, which would be to their advantage. It also allows implicitly allows anyone to try to duplicate the back end system, but that is a heck of a lot of work for which they aren't providing source code for.

This reminds me of the time back in the '90s when Microsoft "opened" (this was before the term Open Source) the COM/DCOM/ActiveX specifications by turning them over to ECMA (a computer manufacturer's trade group) for "standardization". Then they paid Software AG to port the COM support stack to Unix, which didn't work very well because (for one thing) there were numerous dependencies on Windows data structures such as hWnd and hDC. Except for a few gullible journalists in the trade press, the world basically ignored "cross-platform DCOM", and soon it went away.