Seems like Thomson Reuters have finally caught up (been forced to catch up?) with Bloomberg on the more open usage of instrument codes with the lifting of restrictions on the usage of RICs (see Finextra article). They have not gone as far as open sourcing RIC codes as Bloomberg has with its Open Symbology intiative. Bloomberg are still going to push the virtues of going fully open source with their codes (see comment on the end of the Finextra article), but at least with RICs being usable outside of Thomson Reuters systems and customers, then at least the industry seems making some pragmatic steps forward on instrument identifiers.