is marketcetera really open source?

Posted on April 8th, 2008 by Yousef Ourabi

Marketcetera, the “open source” Automated Stock Trading has tickled the funny bone of the blog hype machine…

All the other cool kids(Ostatic, VentureBeat, The Open Road) are blogging about “Marketcetera” so I’ll yield and follow along…

The platform which is currently at the 0.4.2 release — 1.0 scheduled for Q3 2008 uses the “FIX” protocol to execute automated trades with brokerages and banks.

Marketcetera has received a 4 million dollar A round from Shasta Ventures and Jack Selby (Clarium Capital (hedge fund))  — the general plan is to start charging for data that will be helpful to the analysis the big boys (hedge funds) do.

Oh, right, that open source thing. I started poking around on the site, and on the left navigation there is a link to “Contribute”… sounds promising… I was redirected to a page with a license agreement… and things get interesting… I was presented with the following license agreement (see below, link here for full version: http://www.marketcetera.com/contributors/display)

I’m wondering… this doesn’t sound like the licenses I’m used to, this clearly isn’t OSI ratified yet… is it fair (and legal) to call this open source (Disclaimer: not a lawyer)

This is the current version 0.1 of the Marketcetera Contributor License Agreement, as of March 23, 2007.

Summary (see below for full license):

The Marketcetera Contributor License Agreement (CLA) means, in simple terms, that:

  • You assign and transfer the copyright of your contribution to Marketcetera to the extent permitted by applicable law. In return you receive back a broad license to re-use and distribute your contribution.
  • You grant a patent license to Marketcetera and its users, in the event that you own a patent that covers your contribution.
  • You represent that you coded and own the contribution, and are legally entitled to grant the assignment and license.
  • You may provide support for free, for a fee, or not at all.
  • Marketcetera has no obligation to accept or use your contribution.
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • Reddit

Filed under: Business, San Francisco, Startups


« Setting http headers with Apache and mod_headers Google App Engine Django FTW »

2 Responses to “is marketcetera really open source?”

  1. Graham Miller, on April 8th, 2008 at 3:28 pm Said:

    Yousef, thanks so much for your interest in Marketcetera. The CLA we have on our site is very similar to the same required by MySQL http://forge.mysql.com/contribute/cla.php and I think few people doubt whether MySQL is open source. So it seems rather harsh to judge us on that, and I think generally that the license that most people are interested in is the one under which you may use the code. The license under which you may use and redistribute our code is the GPL v2, which is an OSI approved license. You can get more information about it here: http://trac.marketcetera.org/trac.fcgi/wiki/Marketcetera/License Thanks, and please let me know if you have any other questions.

  2. Yousef Ourabi, on April 8th, 2008 at 4:31 pm Said:

    Graham,
    Thanks for your feedback, and for clearing up that matter. From the initial agreement where I’m prompted to sign my name, and email (which I assume has some degree of legal binding) it’s really not clear at all that the license used is the GPLv2 —

    I think you should advertise it more clearly as it would avoid any future confusion (as I had).

    Looks like an interesting platform, I’ll have to sink my teeth into the trac wiki and get started.

    Expect some How-To articles here soon.

    Thanks,
    Yousef

Leave a Reply