Today's news that TSE (Tokyo Stock Exchange) has moved to Red Hat's RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as the operating platform for its next-generation "Arrowhead" trading system shouldn't come as a surprise. Linux has become the smart stock market's operating system of choice.

The Deutsche Borse Group manages the International Securities Exchange, an equity options exchange, in New York and the Eurex and Deutsche Borse's own Xetra cash exchange. The Xetra stock exchange platform is also used by the Irish Stock Exchange, the European Energy Exchange, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange among others. It's long used Linux as the basis of these high-speed stock exchanges.

The London Stock Exchange has said its new Linux-based system is delivering world record networking speed, with 126 microsecond trading times. The news comes ahead a major Linux-based switchover in twelve days, during which the open source system will replace Microsoft .Net technology on the group's main stock exchange.

The London Stock Exchange has just crashes again, having made the mistake of betting on Microsoft.

If you work around Linux regularly, in some ways the latest amazing news is… not that amazing. The New York Stock Exchange, where the world’s largest public companies trade their stocks, is now running on Linux. (Microsoft is not listed on the NYSE; they trade on the NASDAQ. Now *that* would have been a fun headline…) In addition the Chicago Mercantile Exchange also runs on Linux.

One is continually climbing the stock markets while the other is perpetually falling. One is helping to save their market-space while the other threatens to help take theirs down.

Linux belongs to No One. Linux isn't owned...you can't purchase stock in it. You can't defeat it by purchasing it and then disassembling it so it can't compete against you. You can't even take it to court and sue it for infringing on your patents. Steve Ballmer has blustered and bullied to his full potential with threats to do exactly that...

Cute cartoon for December 16th about why the New York Stock Exchange decided that Linux migration was the best idea...

The London Stock Exchange has said its new open source-based trading system will save it at least £10 million annually, as well as driving new business.