Athena Capital Research

In order to enhance our agility and service our diverse technological needs, Athena Capital Research heavily leverages open source software. Furthermore, we are true participants in the free/open-source software ecosystem, placing a premium on giving back to open source projects both financially and technically. If we discover issues, fix bugs, or create enhancements to a piece of software, we share this information with that project’s community.

Athena Capital Research publishes these modifications although it is not a requirement of the software licenses. This attitude is contrary to the pervasive secrecy of the quantitative finance industry. We truly believe in the participation culture of the open source community.

Of course, we get a warm fuzzy feeling from all of this. On a more pragmatic level, however, the business case is there and it has been proven to us time and again that open collaboration is synergistic—we get more out than we put in.

Projects we actively contribute to (with either code or cash):

• Eclipse
• luabind
• LuaJava
• LuaJIT
• mysql++
• OpenAFS
• scythe matrix library
• pion-net
• mongodb

Debian packages we maintain or sponsor:

• bitmagic
• Google sparsehash
• Threading Building Blocks
• ActiveRecord
• Flam3 and Electric Sheep

Athena Open Source Projects:

• RubyLuaBridge—a seamless bridge between Ruby and Lua

Athena Capital Research annually donates a percentage of our profits to organizations whose technologies are imperative to our operations. Past beneficiaries include:

• Software In The Public Interest (Debian)
• Free Software Foundation (FSF / GNU)