Live data from Hacker News

Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

db.com

21–30 of 216 posts

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#22

Get ready for a data dump of 40 year old COBOL code /s But in all seriousness, this is a great step forward in institutional software. Open up software to further progress towards standardizing an industry's software interface.

I would love for a few banks to dump all their old COBOL code on to GitHub. Not because it would necessarily be useful for anything, but simply because it would be fascinating to read... There is actually very little open source COBOL code available, of the massive quantities of COBOL code written over the decades the vast, vast majority of it remains closed source.

Sadly I think a lot of it is just going to be lost to history... at an old employer of mine, I remember we had a store room full of old 9 track mainframe backup tapes – the mainframe had been retired and we no longer had a 9 track tape drive to read them with – I wonder if they are still there now – ideally they'd be sent to some sort of archive – they couldn't be released now without vetting because they would have contained confidential information (e.g. employee payroll information, customer data), but a century from now when all of us are dead who cares if our confidential info gets released to the public then?

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#23
post #7

Great move. I really believe in the "free software, free society" idea of the FSF. After this batch, I'm sure there will still be a lot left to open source, but it's definitely a big step! If we're fortunate, others will follow suit. Germany is a great country for stuff like this. They have a relatively high share of Linux users, OpenStreetMap usage, etc. I feel like they're very critical towards their own country an…

Do you also believe that the Banks really believe in the "free software, free society" idea of the FSF?

I believe not.

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#26
post #8

Link to code: https://github.com/symphonyoss/plexus-interop

Says public domain in the post but all the code says Apache, weird~

Article author probably doesn't realize there's a distinction between "publicly available" and "public domain"

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#29
post #24

ProtobufTransportProtocolSerializationProvider Enterprise OO Garbage is alive and well.

How would we prevent this? Asking for a friend.

Just refuse to play the insane Java/C# Enterprise OO game. Kotlin would be a good alternative but my preference would be Clojure where brevity and simplicity are valued.

Re: Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

#30

Get ready for a data dump of 40 year old COBOL code /s But in all seriousness, this is a great step forward in institutional software. Open up software to further progress towards standardizing an industry's software interface.

I would actually appreciate that. I recently dealt with a DDF file that was 780 columns of tabular data.
Post reply on HN