I'm guessing that previously Bloomberg either charged or didn't allow 3rd party access to their APIs so that you could develop your own apps on top of the datafeed.
By making it open, it opens up the market for 3rd party tool developers to build apps that can access the Bloomberg feed data.
To those that are complaining, I have a developer subscription to IQFeed, which charges a fee of around $70/month for delayed data, and I pay $300/yr, so Bloomberg offering it for free is pretty good. Too bad their data feed costs ~$1000/month.
There is a monthly cost and also tiered, metered usage. Keep in mind this isn't just for accessing North American exchanges. Our data customers can access all data we have, from the 110+ countries we collect feeds from.
By making it open, it opens up the market for 3rd party tool developers to build apps that can access the Bloomberg feed data.
To those that are complaining, I have a developer subscription to IQFeed, which charges a fee of around $70/month for delayed data, and I pay $300/yr, so Bloomberg offering it for free is pretty good. Too bad their data feed costs ~$1000/month.