Miki, over at Leadership Turn, tagged me and asked what I will do with my tax refund. This obviously has nothing to do with my usual topics. Although, strangely enough the next meeting of the Bay APLN has been titled “Taxing Agile”.

Let me start with two notes. First this refund only applies to US tax payers. In most other countries, don’t expect to get any money back. Second, whatever you with your refund, given the poor shape of the US economy, it will be good for the country and quite possibly for the world. Paying down debts and saving are good as it frees some cash for banks to stay in business. Spend and it will help businesses stay afloat.

To link this back to agile subjects, let’s remember that, in a well designed tax scheme, only those who can contribute are taxed. Moreover they are only taxed according to the level they can contribute to but only at a level that encourages them to be able to contribute more. In such a well established tax system contributions grow as well as the well being of contributors. Now I think about it, it really is similar to how companies work. Typical teams try to over tax their members until they have nothing more to give. Agile teams tax their members less to encourage a continuously growing return.

I kind of wonder what a refund means in that case ? Is you were too taxed ? Or that you did not produce as much as anticipated ? I will let my valued readers answer this.

Meanwhile I will answer the original question. As far as I am concerned, it will go into the savings category, most probably under the college fund header.

Alas, as I do not know any american blogger well enough to tag them, I am unable to fulfil the Meme. Oh well… I need to network more !

This is only the result of a quick search but it surfaced mightily interesting projects and interesting initiatives. I am glad to see some open source picking up in the financial applications area. It will be initially hard to compete with some of the software companies in the arena but it may help revitalise internal development efforts in major institutions and enhance the experience here.

Also there is certainly an opportunity there for smaller institutions to leverage open source and participate in it rather than buy very expensive, over the top commercial solutions.

QuickFix is a Fix engine that works with C, Java and even Ruby,

Marketcetera is an order management system that uses mostly java but also has a rails application,

JFin is a java project that offers date manipulation (fixed income developers know how precious this is) and is trying to build a derivatives model,

And a few quant libraries QuantLib, KQuant and JQuantLib.

I also need to mention OpenAdaptor, which was actually developed and contributed by Dresdner Kleinwort.