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A financial market describing itself as the “world’s largest derivatives exchange” has joined the Linux Foundation. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has been a vocal proponent of Linux since 2003, when it began using the open source OS to improve trade speed and system reliability, it says.

In the world of financial trading, speed is of the essence. The CME now says that since it first started using Linux, the operating system’s increasing real-time capabilities have “extended the fundamental savings of Linux, by enabling more transactions to be made in a given day.”

The CME Group last year handled 2.2 billion contracts worth $1.2 quadrillion, it claims.

Financial exchange joins Linux Foundation.

The iPhone may be the only game in town for serious mobile Web developers right now, but that won’t last long. Next year, the iPhone will see some serious competition from Google’s Android platform. Of course, T-Mobile will start selling the first Android phone, the G1 made by HTC, on October 22. But other cell phone manufacturers are gearing up for a major Android push.

The most significant of these may come from Motorola. One of the original partners in the Open Handset Alliance behind the open-source mobile OS, Motorola already has 50 people on its Android team and is growing that to 350, according to an Android developer approached by a headhunter to join the team. That is a huge commitment that shows how big a bet Motorola is making on Android.

Motorola Building Up 350-Person Android Team. Nokia Also Sniffing Around..

Cisco Systems Inc., the $35 billion king of proprietary networking, has transformed its data centers to an automated, service-centric on-demand model based, at least in part, on open source software.

The San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant is four years into a nine-year restructuring and virtualization project that will consolidate its compute, storage, networking and application resources into a unified, on-demand pool that increases IT responsiveness to evolving business requirements and lowers costs, according to IT Manager Sidney Morgan. In addition, it will boost availability and redundancy and chop provisioning time for new servers from as long as eight weeks to three days, a task that ultimately will be automated and filled in real time in response to changing business needs, he predicted.

Cisco taps Linux for agility, low cost in data center.

Visa has become the latest player to try and start a fire under mobile payments and mobile commerce, a concept that in the U.S. has remained mostly in the imagination over the last decade. Visa’s first partners in its roll-out are Nokia and Google’s Android platform. Its partnership with a major credit company is a win for Google’s fledgling mobile operating system.

Linux News: M-Commerce: Visa to Turn Android, Nokia Phones Into Credit Cards.