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Finland -- the open-source society | page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
It's also the room in which Linux was first made available to the general public, which makes it one of the original source points for open source -- and as close as you can get to a holy shrine for free software. For years, says Salminen, the demand from outside Finland for downloads of free software from nic.funet.fi required the imposition of bandwidth transfer "speed limits" to keep the network usable for Finns. As I strolled among the computers, half-listening to Salminen, the chief "coordinator" for nic.funet.fi, I could almost see the world-spanning network, an infinitely tangled spider web of connectivity, spiraling out from this one node, delivering one of the Net's most infectious packages of software to countless other nodes. I wondered what a real-time look at the scrolling log files of nic.funet.fi might have revealed back in August 1991, as hackers from all over the globe arrived, downloaded, left, and then used Linux and all the other free software tools that make up a Linux-based operating system to build their own nodes from which to spread the digital word. A room full of computers is hardly a romantic sight, but here, at Linux's original launching point, I felt as physically close to the soul of the Internet as I had ever been. Salminen seemed bemused at my sincere intensity. A typical Finn and a typical geek -- fluent in six languages, an expert in C* and Perl* programming -- he chewed over my questions as if he wasn't quite sure they were worth asking. He had no problem providing the nuts and bolts of the history of the Internet in Finland: In 1988 Salminen was personally in charge of setting up the link between the FUNET network and the NSFNET backbone of the Internet, in conjunction with four other Scandinavian nations He could tell me exactly who had first uploaded Linux to nic.funet.fi -- a student named Ari Lemmke -- and on what date commercial sales of Internet connections began in Finland -- 1993. But why was Finland so wired? Why had Finns made so many contributions to the Internet? Why was the country so gaga over all forms of telecommunication -- beginning with the phone? There is no single answer. But there are some telling data points. First, the Finnish infatuation with the telephone is no new phenomenon, no mere byproduct of Nokia's dramatic rise to prominence. Finns have been crazy about phones from practically the first moment they could get their hands on them. In 1896, Mrs. Alex-Tweedie, an English travel writer, noted that "Finland is full of phones." Angel Ganivet, the Spanish consul in Finland in 1896-97, observed that phones were almost as common as kitchenware, and devoted an entire chapter of his book on Finland to the "excessive" interest Finns had in technology. It also has become an inordinately popular national obsession (at least among the telecom-literate people I interviewed) to mention at least once a day how there were more than 800 separate telephone companies in the country during the 1920s and '30s. Finland is a sparsely settled country -- a little over 5 million people are sprinkled across a land mass 1,000 kilometers long from north to south. An attraction to phones is therefore an understandable outgrowth of local geography. But a historical misstep by the Russian tsar also played a crucial role. During the 19th century Finland was an "autonomous Grand Duchy" under the rule of the Russian Empire. (Prior to that, for seven centuries Finland had been ruled by its neighbor, Sweden.) Finland's multitude of phone companies was a legacy of the Tsar's decision to declare the telegraph a militarily essential device -- and the telephone, on the other hand, little more than a toy. Wary of the possibility that the Tsar might change his mind, the Finnish government chose to grant licenses to operate telephone companies to all applicants -- in marked contrast to the practice of most other nations, who ensured that telephone operation was a tightly controlled state monopoly. The reasoning of the Finnish government was as follows: It would be much easier for the tsar to renege on his decision if all he had to do was simply close down or otherwise take control of one state enterprise, rather than hunt down hundreds of independent companies. When you have 800 telephone companies in a country that, in the 1920s, only had a population of 2 million to 3 million people, you are forced to become expert in interconnection technologies. As a result, Finns understand networking. I was reminded of this constantly during my week in Helsinki, in both small ways and large. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was helping to coordinate my visit, (and which paid for my airfare to Finland) gave everyone I interviewed a copy of my schedule, so everyone knew who I had talked to already and who I would be talking to next -- they even used me as a conduit for messages between each other. I was absorbed into their network as effortlessly as a well-configured Web server handles a newly arrived connection request. In Finland, the mobile phone has evolved into much more than just a symbol of Nokia's corporate power -- it is now a vehicle for the etiquette of personal encounters. Examining a new acquaintance's phone -- for new features, for style or just for the heck of it -- is as natural as shaking hands. And provision of cutting-edge wireless services isn't just future hype, it's a cornerstone of the national economy. Near the end of my stay, I had dinner with Jarkko Oikarinen,* the inventor of IRC. He told me that that very day he had decided to quit his job as a programmer in the University of Oulu's medical school in favor of joining a startup to work on wireless applications for mobile phones. I hardly blinked. Join the crowd, Jarkko. The question, in Finland, isn't "who is doing the interesting work in wireless networking?" but rather "who isn't?" So that most telling stat about Finland -- 5 million people, 4 million mobile phones -- begins to make sense. But what about the Net? Where's the built-in connection to programming? Salminen shrugs. It's the long winter, he says. Finland's the northernmost country in Europe -- nearly a third of the nation is within the Arctic Circle. There's just not much else to do besides hack. |
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