“For years, it has charged these companies to stream market data
through an online interface it calls MAMA (Middleware Agnostic
Messaging API). MAMA has been in use since the middle of the last
decade, letting banks and funds tap into an NYSE software platform
that streams data from more than 200 global markets.“But on Monday NYSE Technologies abandoned the profit motive and
open sourced MAMA. The idea is to create a standard interface for
all market data services, so that even the smallest financial
institutions can play the markets more easily. The open source
incarnation is known as, yes, OpenMAMA, and the hope is that it
will be adopted by other outfits streaming market data in much the
same way, including Reuters, Bloomberg, Active Financial, and SR
Labs.”