No, the GS SLANG is 100% proprietary to GS – nobody outside of GS uses it. You cannot buy text-books for Slang. You cannot buy SLANG anywhere.

The knowledge of how to use SLANG is passed down by word-of-mouth in a bizarre tribal ritual.

@stacyherbert
“With the help of the federal govt and FBI, GS has managed to wipe out some competition . . .”

This sounds more plausible right? You turn a harmless code-theft without intent to distribute into an international scandal with you as the victim. Meanwhile you get to shut-down your rival and impose harsh conditions before they are allowed to trade in the USA.

Who wins in this circumstance?

Mac OS is American, and its BSD core has a long history in America. BSD’s codebase in the purest since has never left the US.

QNX is not in this lot.

QNX is a Canadian operating system that is

– REALTIME
– MICROKERNAL
– RESILIENT
– Significantly open source, but not Kernel or “Core Drivers”

and a rare one at that.

Technically QNX has been partially superseded by the open Minix 3 — based on the educational open source QNX 1 & 2.

Minix 3 is written by an American, but snippets of Minix 1 became the basis for Linux.

I view it a good idea to have QNX and Minix 3 competing against each other — it keeps these real time OSes honest.

For some reason a lot of spacecraft use VXworks…

http://www.swd.de/products/datasheets/slang_en.html

If so it looks like it needs to run on the QNX OS.
The QNX OS may be older but it is a very robust and fast OS.

It is used for many time and safety critical applications.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aqYxg0DptluE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daNr_TrBw6E

Just another video for you to watch?

There is also this: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/citadel-trail-emerges-goldman-injunction-follow-shortly

With the help of the federal govt and FBI, GS has managed to wipe out some competition . . .

A number of theories presented by others here.

1. It could be a case that this code contains something embarrasing – e.g. ugly hacks.

2. Create the illusion of novelty by making a fuss over something which was stolen even though it is worthless outside of it’s intended context.

3. Revenge – perhaps this guy went to work for a rival bank?

4. Automated laywering – perhaps the senior management do not care… just let the lawyers & security people do what they do.

The knowledge a VP takes with him is usually far more valuable than the actual code. From what I can tell there’s no actual proof that the code was “stolen” with the intent to re-distribute. It might have been copied for personal reference. Even though that’s illegal it’s common practice amongst developers to take a personal archive of any work.

Interestingly I met a bunch of former GS people who went to work for JPM. Their brief was to re-produce the GS systems but using the latest software technology. GS software is built using SLANG which is a programming language dedicated to high-performance finance. It’s also 20 years out of date.

Unfortunately GS have such a huge legacy of SLANG code they cannot escape it. No other bank would ever want to copy their stuff… it’s just too awful for words!

,but what was shocking was the disappearance of the #1 mainstay of complete trading domination (i.e., Goldman Sachs) from not just the aforementioned #1 spot, but the entire complete list. In other words: Goldman went from 1st to N/A in one week.

FROM: Is a Case of Quant Trading Sabotage About to Destroy Goldman Sachs? http://tinyurl.com/rxpp5c

http://www.nyse.com/pdfs/PT06.22-06.26.pdf

You guys saw this right? I wonder why Goldman isn’t on that list.

My question is: is this corporate espionage (as is being portrayed) or national espionage. If Russia knows that the market is controlled by GS’ software, they may want to get some of that software (in spite of the challenge of reverse engineering). Is it just a coincidence that last week we saw the CIA recruiting bankers? Perhaps the KGB is one or two years ahead of them?

Max, could you consider getting Kevin Mitnick On The Edge to comment on this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick

(ps. it looks like there is another Chris posting to this board; perhaps we should distinguish ourselves!)