The Financial Information Services Division of the Software and Information Industry Association (FISD) today announces the release of the new MDDL 3.0 Open Source license for the financial information industry.
MDDL, or Market Data Definition Language, is an open industry standard XML dialect for securities market data. The announcement of the new license aims to remove possible ambiguity regarding intellectual property issues associated with using MDDL. "This confirms that MDDL is an open standard and, since it is a "non-GPL" license, it is not subject to "downstream" licensing concerns." according to Bill Nichols, Program Director for Securities Processing Automation at FISD.
"MDDL 3.0 represents the culmination of over 5 years of industry investment," said Tom Davin, Managing Director of FISD. "After releasing the 3.0 beta last year, our members recognized the industry's concerns regarding IP issues and decided that a more formal license posture was called for." he added.
MDDL facilitates the interaction of information between exchanges and related sources, vendors and redistributors, and consumers of market data. "Market data" includes pricing, descriptive and reference information, and statistics about financial instruments, exchanges and the organizations that trade through them, the economy in general, and other related economic and business factors. MDDL also includes commodity, cash, and foreign exchange components that fall outside the typical realm of pricing for securities. The new license, the MDDL data model, XML Schema, and related documentation are available at www.mddl.org. Free registration is required to access some of the information.