 |
|
|
|
|
|
     | |||||
 |
|
 |
|||
 | |||||
|
Finland -- the open-source society
- - - - - - - - - - - - Back in the summer of 1993, I went to Finland for all my software needs. I never questioned why. I just knew that if I wanted a free copy of Tetris, or an image viewer for looking at jpegs* of Madonna, or an application that would make Chinese characters readable in my e-mail, I headed to Finland -- or rather, to the Internet address "nic.funet.fi." It was just another one of the lovable eccentricities of the old Internet. For some reason, one of the world's largest repositories of freely redistributable software could be found in a small Northern European country previously most famous for sauna baths and Sibelius. Today, Finland is famous for other reasons -- notably, for being the original home of both Nokia, the world's largest and most profitable manufacturer of mobile phones, and Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Finland is also now widely hailed as one of the most "wired" nations on the planet (as judged by mobile phone and Internet usage). Once known mostly for exports of pulp and paper products from its vast forests, Finland now enjoys the unexpected honor of being acclaimed throughout Europe as a role model for the so-called Information Society. Nokia receives the lion's share of the credit. An aggressive, fast-growing, fully global company that makes Microsoft look like an old fuddy-duddy, Nokia is hiring new employees at the rate of 1,000 per month. The company so dominates the economy of Finland that a sudden drop in its stock price sends jitters through the entire nation. But which came first, the Nokia chicken or the Finnish egg? Is Nokia the reason that glued-to-their-phones Finns often seem like some strange new cyborg beast -- homo mobilis telefonicus? Or does the much-touted Finnish openness to new technology explain Nokia's surge to the forefront of the global economy? Finland's love affair with high technology runs deep. The closer you look, the less remarkable it seems that a 21-year-old undergraduate at the University of Helsinki cooked up some code that ended up throwing the entire software industry into turmoil. For Linux is far from Finland's only contribution to Internet culture: To an extent way out of proportion to its size, Finland has bequeathed unto the Net a valuable and culturally rich set of essential tools. In addition to the software library at nic.funet.fi, there is also the much beloved, albeit now somewhat archaic, Internet Relay Chat, or IRC* -- one of the first popular open-source programs to enable real-time online conversations between globally dispersed Internet users. There's also ssh,* a program hugely popular with hackers and geeks that helps ensure secure online transmission of data. And, perhaps most notoriously, there's that Net icon of the early '90s, Johan Helsingius'* "anon.penet.fi" anonymous remailer* -- a tool that, until the Church of Scientology convinced Finnish authorities to shut it down, allowed the paranoid or privacy-conscious to post to newsgroups and send mail in complete, cryptographically protected anonymity. These contributions, and even Linux itself, may be just a drop in the bucket of the hundreds of thousands of software programs hackers have uploaded to the Net. But the Finns' predilection for creating such tools reveals an acute understanding of the nature of a networked, open-source society. Finland's contributions to the Net pose a conundrum. When Finns asked me why I had come to their out-of-the-way nation, I gave them two reasons. The first was obvious -- I had come to dig up background information on Linus Torvalds. So I visited the university where he first started hacking on Linux. I talked with people who had studied under Torvalds' maternal grandfather, a well-known professor of statistics, and who were used to watching his father, a television reporter, deliver dispatches from the war in Chechnya. I even hung out in the neighborhood bar his mother is known to frequent. And everywhere I went, people were eager to gossip. Did I know what his mother said about Linus' love life in last Saturday's afternoon newspaper? Was I aware that his parents had been members of the Communist Party? What did I think about the fact that in the late '60s his student radical father, Nils Torvalds, had infuriated his other grandfather, a conservative newspaper editor, by posing on the cover of a magazine holding a machine gun? And could I please tell them how much Linus was worth? A hundred million? A billion? But Linus wasn't the whole story. I also sought the answer to a question I must have been subconsciously mulling over ever since I waited for that first software program from 10,000 miles away to creep across my 2400 baud modem in 1993. Why Finland? In the 21st century, there's hardly a nation in the world that doesn't want to be a role model for the information society. What made Finland so special? Was it an accident of history, the luck of the draw, or some more complex intersection of cultural evolution and the activist will of an entire people? More to the point, was it possible that the deep structure of Finnish civilization encourages an open-source way of life? |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Next page |