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I have had a thread shut down as Ninjatrader claimed using FIX Api was a breach of their terms of service. I ahve posted their terms of service and asked to clarify what parts have been breached....still watining for a reply.
I post below a thread from the official Ninjatrader forum from an official Ninjatrade customer service rep in regard to using Fix protacol with Ninjatrader. It is quite clear that Ninjatrader forum are more than happy for users to work on finding a solution on their own site, but the threads get shut down here and they state the TOS have been breached.
I'm a paid up member of both this site and a full licence for NT8. If you are going to shut down my valid posts you should be able to explain why. I await a response from either Ninjatrader or Futures.io
#2
03-28-2019, 05:53 PM
Hello mbogliardi,
Thanks for your post.
If you are familiar with the Fix API you could likely use some C# to do some things with it in NinjaTrader. However that would be outside the scope of anything we could support.
We can leave this forum post open in case anyone else has further information.
________________________________________________________________________________
Prohibited Uses 5(a)(viii) is the relevant section of the Terms of Service Agreement that states specifically " develop an interface between Platform to Broker APIs without the express written consent from the
Company"
Ray
Disclosure: This communication is sent to you by NinjaTrader, LLC, a software development company which owns and supports all proprietary technology relating to and including the NinjaTrader trading platform.
To be clear, your complaint should be directed solely to @NinjaTrader. Your previous thread was closed here at FIO because your topic was not permitted, as it fell into the section of piracy of software. Such topics are not permitted in any way here. I also understand that was never your intent, but once it became clear that is what was ultimately occuring, we had to shut it down.
As to why it falls under piracy, it's because @NinjaTrader states what you are doing is a violation of their license, essentially meaning you are using their product without permission or without agreeing to their EULA.
Personally, I liked your idea of using FIX protocol. But to do so in order to circumvent a purposefully placed limitation within their software is against their EULA.
Now, this thread here, where you are discussing "why", is certainly permitted and you are free to engage @NinjaTrader and ask them why they've done this.
On a second personal note, I suggest you always weigh the complaints and grievances against the positives you benefit from with any product. Do you gain more than you lose? Then probably it's a good idea to keep the product. If not, then the ultimate vote should always be made by your wallet - purchase a different product if you believe there is a superior one, or delay your purchase until the vendor does whatever you are asking of them that is of critical importance to your use case.
In fairness to @NinjaTrader, I don't think the user's thread title of "NT8 making rules up as they go along" is at all an accurate description of what has taken place here. While I am not going to modify the title at this time, I would strongly encourage the user to do so. A more accurate title for instance might be "NinjaTrader's EULA rules".
In fairness to @b16aln, I think the frustration may have originated from the fact that NT Josh told him one thing, while NT Ray is shutting him down with another thing. I personally believe the Josh was just telling him what is possible without considering the EULA consequences, and it wasn't done with ill intent, but it has frustrated the customer to receive two conflicting responses.
It is probably a good idea that NT Support Team is made aware of this thread and just asked to consider EULA in these edge cases.
I also just want to add that @bobwest did nothing wrong, in fact he asked @NinjaTrader to clarify under my direction to do so as I was away from my system. Once NT responded, he did the correct thing in shutting down the thread in order to comply with site rules. My thanks goes out to @bobwest for doing a great job as Site Moderator.
As I posted, the Ninjatrader representative stated on 28th March 2019 that "If you are familiar with the Fix API you could likely use some C# to do some things with it in NinjaTrader. However that would be outside the scope of anything we could support." This is quite clearly express written consent...given by an NT official... on the official NT website. There are numerous NT forum posts about using FIX protocol with NT and at NO POINT does ninjatrader shut down the threads and state that it is a breach of their terms.
While we are on the subject of FIX, could Ninjatrader advise the community why they are unwilling to add this to the platform officially as it is a valuable tool for traders and one offered by most other high level trading platforms e.g cTrader, Multicharts.
Bike Mike, I disagree that bobwest did a great job here. The thread should not have been closed down, discussion in regard to the potential prodution of a FIX protocol is NOT against NT terms. Developing an interface without express permission IS apparently against the terms. DISCUSSING the potential of developing something is NOT against any rules and should never have been shut down. Having an open discussion, which NT would be watching should have led us down the path of discovery and revealed that in order to start the actual development of the interface, if there was enough interest in developing it, we would need permission from NT8....what would have wrong with that? That is what discussion is all about, discuss an idea, find out the in and outs and what is required to make it possible...for all we know @NinjaTrader still might ok the development for indivual use when asked. What your moderator should have done (in conjunction with @NinjaTrader) once the rules were clarified was to point out that the actual development of the the interface can;t take place util permission is given by NT.
There are no terms that state DISCUSSING the potential development of an add on is prohibited, therefore there has been no breach and I quite resent the fact that the thread was shut down because your moderator claimed it breached the terms. Discussing the potential for an add on breaches no terms.
This should have been a simple heads up by site moderators that we would need contact NT to get permission before actually starting the development. Totally unnesscesary to shut down the whole thread. For all you know there could be several user interested in developing this and adding their support and we could then have put forward our case when seeking permission from NT8, now however users aren't even allowed to discuss whether they would be interested in taking this further. Bobwest has totally jumped the gun here.
If the NT terms stated that it was prohibited to develop an interface at all, then I can understand the thread being closed however the terms simply state we need to seek permission before developing so we should be allowed to discuss this.
Sorry for the inconsistency between the NinjaTrader forum and the FIO forum. While not an excuse, I think we are over 50 customer service employees and sometimes, incorrect responses fall through the crack. I have escalated this to our head of support to make sure it is accurately handled in the future. As the original author of our Terms of Service Agreement, this prohibited use provision has been there for as long as I can remember. Its there for many reasons, its part of our business strategy.
Ray
Disclosure: This communication is sent to you by NinjaTrader, LLC, a software development company which owns and supports all proprietary technology relating to and including the NinjaTrader trading platform.
Sorry, but I disagree. That's like saying discussing where to obtain a pirated copy of software is acceptable here, while actually clicking the link and downloading it is illegal.
In my opinion, our community simply has no reason to encourage or allow such behavior or discussions. We don't need to thread the needle here when it comes to that kind of topic.
As I said, the entire FIX angle has been explained by @NinjaTrader to be against their acceptable use which you agreed to. Therefore, there is no reason to encourage continued discussion on that.
However, also as I said above, you are welcome to question why @NinjaTrader reached such a decision. You can do so in this thread. Like I also said, I would encourage you to change the title of the thread because it is not at all accurate.
To be clear, we are not prohibiting the discussion of NinjaTrader's license agreement. You are free to do so. However, we are not permitting the discussion of things that are against NinjaTrader's license agreement. Another example is the selling of used NinjaTrader licenses. We routinely close such threads, as they go against the license agreement and we wouldn't want to encourage such behavior - especially since someone is at risk of buying a license then find they are in violation and unsupported and have wasted their money.
Last, please don't create duplicate threads on this. You have a perfectly good thread here to discuss the issue. No need to create more.
That's a terrible analogy. For a start we are not talking about illegal activity. Secondly we are not talking about accessing and altering the licensed sofware code. We are talking about developing a 3rd party add on which is generally allowed. Pirating copyrighted software is a deliberate attempt to steal the software. You are way off here....
You are failing to grasp the point. It is not against the terms to discuss the possibility of developing a FIX connection, it is not against the terms to establish a working group who are interested in developing a fix connection. The terms simply state that we need permission from the Co before we can move forward with the development of such a connection.
