I can understand the reaction on this community to the news, and I'm sure that there are elements of PR and recruitment strategy here, but I happen to know that the primary driver is pretty sound; job satisfaction for top employees.<p>Goldmans has its share of top programmers and, like any company, is keen to retain them. One of these people made contributing to Open Source a major goal for last year.<p>Well done to him, and well done to GS for supporting him. The company (rightly) gets a ton of bad press, but that doesn't mean it can't do good things as well.<p>Disclaimer: I'm an ex GS employee, but have nothing to gain.
From their FAQ:<p><pre><code> Why is Goldman Sachs open-sourcing GS Collections?
</code></pre>
- We believe that GS Collections offers a significant advantage over existing solutions. We hope others will benefit from it.<p>- We believe in the power of the technical community to help improve GS Collections.<p>- Technology is a huge part of what we do at Goldman Sachs. GS Collections exemplifies our commitment to technology.<p>- We use open source software in many of our operations. We have benefited from the work of others and we'd like to give something back.<p><pre><code> Does Goldman Sachs use GS Collections?
</code></pre>
- Yes, we use GS Collections in many of our internal applications.
Why not? It's a large corporation with many branches and technical needs, some of which are harmless to open-source. Despite its reputation, I don't think they go through their day thinking "hmm... we could open-source this, or we could go kick a puppy instead! Muahahaha!"
I'm not entirely surprised. A few months ago (a year and a half! wow!) GS hired Ulrich Drepper, the longtime project lead of the GNU C library.<p>I also read another article (no way I can find it again now) saying how big investment banks are hiring more and more software engineers.<p>Disclaimer: I work in IT for a large investment bank which's gradually outsourcing all its IT department to south asian countries.
Ahh, it's Henry Blodget fault. He argued that Goldman lost the FB IPO partly because the other underwrites were semi geeks investment bankers, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/morgan-stanley-goldman-sachs-facebook-ipo-2012-5" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/morgan-stanley-goldman-sachs-...</a>
There are a few other brands on there, including Walmart and Amazon:<p><a href="https://github.com/walmartlabs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/walmartlabs</a><p><a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/walmartlabs_kosmix.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/walmartlabs_kosmix.php</a><p><a href="https://github.com/amazonwebservices" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/amazonwebservices</a><p>I can imagine Goldmans are using Github to acquire talent and new ideas. I am sure they have some complex problems and technology that needs fixing.<p>Stack Exchange had a discussion on this last year:<p><a href="http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/61062/why-should-large-financial-insurance-companies-use-git-and-or-github" rel="nofollow">http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/61062/why-sho...</a>
<p><pre><code> ...
import com.gs.collections.impl.block.factory.Comparators;
import com.gs.collections.impl.block.factory.Functions;
import com.gs.collections.impl.block.procedure.CollectionAddProcedure;
import com.gs.collections.impl.collection.mutable.AbstractCollectionAdapter;
...
</code></pre>
Gees, I feel sorry for people still stuck using Java.
<i>We currently do all development in an internal Subversion repository and are not prepared to take external contributions.</i><p>It's a PR and recruiting tool.
Reminds me of the completely Open Source financial analytics company Open Gamma (<a href="http://www.opengamma.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.opengamma.com</a>). They also have a GitHub account with (in their own words) functional java code <a href="https://github.com/OpenGamma" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OpenGamma</a>.<p>This Java paradigm of "private final static" all over the place and its ugliness is one of the prime reasons Rich Hickey considered creating Clojure.
Software is eating the world. But I really shouldn't be surprised as I am at this one, since trading is well-known to be the most algorithmic math-geek industry at present.
This does not seem to be new. According to their profile they have had an account since Dec 16, 2011. This might be the first time they have open sourced anything though.
Why simulate Lambda? Couldn't they just have waited on Java 8? Or maybe just used JRuby, if Java was a requirement? Still- it's great that they shared this.
I fucking hate goldman sachs.<p>Note because of politics. Not because of any financial action they've done.<p>Because they hired that despicable fuck Ulrich Drepper. Seriously, the amount of nice, young people who were forever turned away from GNU/open source with a bad taste in their mouths because of that scumbag dipshit.<p>I don't care if he was right % percentage of the time. The point of a project is to welcome users, and if you can't do that, why the fuck are you maintaining it?<p>I mean fuck, how many projects switched their libc implementation because of that fuck? Fuck. Fuck that guy.<p>The worst part? I didn't even get something rejected by him. I've just read enough of the communications with that guy to have his name seared into my brain next to the part that produces bile.