[FINOS Community] Announcing FDC3 2.1 and a new license for the FDC3 Standard

[Kristopher West]

<apologies for cross-posting>

The FDC3 maintainers are proud to announce the release of the latest version of the FDC3 Standard: FDC3 2.1 (https://fdc3.finos.org/docs/fdc3-standard).

FDC3 2.1 introduces a long-awaited 5th Part to the FDC3 Standard (Agent Bridging) that allows Desktop Agents to collaborate via a 'Bridge', enabling interop for apps managed by those Desktop Agents to span across them, and even across a user’s different PCs and other devices.  

Inter-agent communication has been a goal of FDC3 since its first version, now realized through collaboration between Desktop Agent vendors (including Interop.io and OpenFin), banks (NatWest, Citi & StateStreet), asset Managers (Wellington) and a number of other participants. FINOS also hosts a project contributed by NatWest Markets which implements a 'Bridge', with plugin support for working with an organization's in-house infrastructure, known as the FDC3 Backplane.

FDC3 2.1 also includes small but important refinements to FDC3's other APIs, the Desktop Agent API and App Directory. However, these remain compatible with the previous version. New use cases are catered for by additions to the Context data and Intents Parts of the Standard, including improved interactions with Chat or CRM applications and both Order & Execution Management Systems (OMS/EMS), with key contributions from Symphony, SingleTrack, Interop.io, OpenFin, Flex Trade and S&P.

Work is already well underway on a number of key initiatives for the next round of FDC3 innovation, including bringing standards-based interop to Web Browsers, other platforms such as .Net and Java applications and deeper examinations of issues of identity and security in FDC3. If you or your firm would like to get involved in the future of interoperability on the Financial Services desktop then please see https://github.com/finos/FDC3#getting-involved. 

Last but not least, after the 2.1 release, FDC3 is moving to the Community Specification License (CSL), developed via the Joint Development Foundation (a Linux Foundation project), as the new license for the FDC3 Standard; the main reason for this switch is to use a widely adopted license that is being used by several open source standard projects, rather than adopting the FINOS IP Policy, a custom license written by the FINOS Legal staff that has been used by FDC3 for the last 4 years.

The license for code and released assets will still be Apache 2.0, as shown in the NPM package metadata and source code file headers; as such, FDC3 consumers will not be affected.

The ICLA and CCLA contracts have been modified, which means that anyone who wants to contribute to FDC3 2.1 and future versions will need to go through the signing process again, including existing contributors. We'll be in touch with known CLA managers in due course.

Finally, if you have topics that you'd like the FDC3 Standard to address in the next version, now is a great time to raise an issue - and we hope to see at the next Standards Working Group meeting on Thursday 28^th September (please contact he...@finos.org if you'd like FDC3 meetings to be added to your calendar).

K

Kris West

Principal Engineer

p +44 7715104292│e kris...@interop.io

Finsemble and Glue42 are now interop.io

 

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