It's a recruiting tool, that's all. They want to be a bit open sourcey to attract top talent. The broken unit test battery that comes with it is a job interview tool.
I would guess this was initiated by IT employees (open sourcing the library might make life easier for them, assuming someone outside the company contributes) and approved by top managers (because it's good for recruitment and makes their IT staff happier).
However I would doubt this will make a big difference when attracting top talent. One important reason for that being (IMO) that the best IT people prefer innovative technologies and GS uses a proprietary in-house programming language and db for everything that's important. Some say their tech was perhaps innovative 25 years ago http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3392636/slang-goldman-sac... .
Not to mention that if you work for GS you lock yourself in those in-house techs. When I went to a job interview at GS and asked what the advantages of using an in-house language and db were, I was told that it's very hard to hack their systems, because no one else uses them (Not sure how valid this argument actually is though).
- We believe in the power of the technical community to help improve GS Collections.
- Technology is a huge part of what we do at Goldman Sachs. GS Collections exemplifies our commitment to technology.
- We use open source software in many of our operations. We have benefited from the work of others and we'd like to give something back.
- Yes, we use GS Collections in many of our internal applications.