In recent years, more and more of the financial transactions have been purely speculative, taking a parasitic tax on the productive economy without providing any service to society at large. In addition, these activities have gone completely out of democratic control. The latest nuisance of this kind is high-speed trading, where computers are used to instantly respond to each tiny fluctuations of the market with massive transaction orders. A computer can perform way more transactions that a human operator can control, and this is becoming a major source of economic instability, as illustrated by the 2009 crisis.
The computers are actually used for short-term market predictions, then all the lemmings want to sell or buy at the same time, therefore the fastest wins. Financial banks have therefore recently become a major consumer of computing power, including FPGA computing, and of course they do have money to fund our research. We truly believe FloPoCo could be useful here, we know it is full of interesting research problems, and still we don't believe it would be a good thing.
In 1972, economist and "Nobel" Prize winner James Tobin suggested that taxing all the financial transactions at a very low rate would harm speculation more than useful finance. The applicability of this idea can be disputed (and has been even by Mr Tobin himself, see the fairly balanced Wikipedia page). Let us try it on FloPoCo.
Therefore, the license on FloPoCo-generated operators reads: For any financial transaction performed on the basis of information computed using at least one operator generated by FloPoCo, a fee of 0.1% (one tenth of a percent) of the amount of the transaction is due to each of the public organisations that funded FloPoCo (...).
It should be clear that we don't really expect to get rich this way. If FloPoCo were to be used for this kind of applications, the amount due to us would be ridiculous. Just 0.1% as ridiculous as the amounts of money that run in circles in these transactions.
This restricted license applies to version 1.15.2 and following of FloPoCo.
Florent de Dinechin (florent.de.dinechin à ens-lyon.fr)