Following up on my blog posts regarding forecasting tools and big data, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has announced that its has made its workhorse macroeconomic forecasting tool open source. By open source, I mean the code resides on a standard code repository available to the public and relies on an open-source computing tool called Julia, which is a hybrid of two popular open-source tools, R and Python. (Note the disclaimers the folks at the Fed place on this: these are not "forecasts" in the traditional sense, but are meant to guide monetary policymakers.) Considering that, prior to the global financial crisis, few of the major journals in economics or finance required authors to provide data and code, this is a substantial development.