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Consume

The first step in engaging with any open source initiative, whether a small, independent project or a large foundation, is to evaluate the work produced so far, and the teams behind that work. At FINOS we have created the FINOS Landscape to showcase all of our Special Interest Groups, Software and Standards Projects in an easily discoverable way. We encourage you to browse both the FINOS Landscape and the FINOS GitHub organization to find projects that are of interest to you. You're welcome and encouraged to reach out to the project leads or to help@finos.org in order to functionally and technically assess the project.

If you've identified an open source component or open standard that you would like to use or build on, please do so! All FINOS-hosted artifacts are published under commercially-friendly, liberal open licenses (for more information, see the "License Categories" section in this same website), which means that you will generally be able to use the code without legal encumbrances.

From a technical perspective, the means by which a particular asset is consumed will vary from project to project. Projects that are in released status are required to publish releases, with the specifics left to each project to decide. Libraries are typically published to the appropriate open source repository manager (Maven Central, NuGet, npm, PyPi, Clojars, and the like), while binary utilities may be made available via GitHub's release mechanism on the project's GitHub page, or (less frequently) via one or more operating system package managers (yum, apt, homebrew, etc.). The best way to determine how to consume a project's releases is to refer to that project's documentation. All of the above applies to open standards projects, such as FDC3, as well.

The FINOS Landscape is a useful tool for zeroing in on Projects and SIGs of interest, as it provides a comprehensive list of all FINOS-hosted projects and Special Interest Groups (SIGs), broken down into categories. The FINOS project Landscape links back to each project's assets.

We encourage you to thoughtfully assess not only the value and fit for purpose, but also the maturity of both the technology and the team that produced a particular code asset. Evaluating the project's momentum and longevity will help you assess the level of technical risk that you may be taking on when leveraging it.

FINOS provides tools to help the community in these assessments, particularly:

  • The Project Lifecycle which provides a single overall measure of the maturity of the work products produced by each Project.
  • The Metrics Dashboard: provides detailed analytics on the activity of each of the Projects and SIGs hosted by the Foundation.

Once you've identified suitable components we encourage you to consume them in your own software development efforts!

As you consume FINOS projects, you may be willing to take an active role in the development of that intellectual property. As an open community, we encourage you to participate in the Projects or Special Interest Groups (SIGs) whose work you consume!

Developing an Open Source Consumption Policy

If you need help consuming Open Source Code, the FINOS Open Source Readiness (OSR) Initiative exists to support financial services organizations in their open source maturity journey. Get in touch and start realizing the benefits of open source code and collaboration today.