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Finland -- the open-source society | page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Torvalds' own parents were both members of the Finnish Communist Party. It's one of the amusing paradoxes of free software: Linus Torvalds, a paragon of pragmatism, currently working in the heart of Silicon Valley for a highly capitalized start-up that epitomizes the way business is done in the free market global economy, grew up in atmosphere drenched in socialist practice and rhetoric. Neither of Torvalds' parents are communists any longer; both are journalists, his father for television and radio, his mother as a translator. And it certainly wasn't out of the ordinary for upper-middle class Finns to be communists in the 1960s. At the time, at least as far as the West was concerned, Finland was clearly part of the Soviet sphere of influence; in Finland itself, there was always a nagging worry as to whether the country would be the next Hungary or Czechoslovakia -- doomed to watch Soviet tanks roll through the capital city. Finns, who as far back as the 19th century had a reputation for stoic resignation, kept quiet and worried about their image. Risto Linturi likes to tell a joke -- "A Finn, a Russian, and an American go to the zoo, and see a huge elephant. The American thinks, 'I could sell this elephant for a lot of money.' The Russian thinks, 'This elephant could feed a lot of people.' But the Finn wonders, 'What does the elephant think about me?'" By the end of my stay in Finland, the Finns were asking me as many questions as I asked them. I got the feeling, sometimes, that I was the elephant. They would rather know what I thought about them than explain themselves to me. But when I told them that the country struck me as a pretty happy place, that everyone was exuding self-confidence from every pore, they acted surprised. Hannu Puttonen, a filmmaker working on a documentary about Linux, was positively perplexed -- Finland, he said, has always seen itself as the "sad country." Even the very first page of the Kalevala refers to the Finnish homeland as "the luckless lands of the North." Perhaps my impressions were skewed, he suggested, by my selection of interview subjects among the movers and shakers in Finland's information society. Nokia scientists and computer programmers were bound to be complacent, given their current success. But the country still has an unemployment rate of almost 10 percent, noted Puttonen, and memories of a deep recession at the beginning of the 1990s are still sharp. That recession was caused, in large part, by the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, which until the early 1990s accounted for 25 percent of Finland's exports. Ever since then, Finland appears to be exhaling a huge sigh of relief -- relief that may be easier to see from the outside looking in. Mato Valtonen is an aging rocker who now runs a company called WAPit, which specializes in wireless application services for mobile phones. Until quite recently, Valtonen was the lead singer and front man for the Leningrad Cowboys, a Finnish rock band with a reputation for punk/postmodern troublemaking. In 1993, Valtonen recalled, the Leningrad Cowboys hired Russia's Red Army Choir to go on tour with them, performing American pop songs. At an outdoor concert in central Helsinki, where 200,000 people attempted to force themselves into a space that could fit only 70,000, one could hear, says Valtonen, the sound of Finland relaxing. The sight of the Red Army Choir singing Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" suggested that Russian tanks were no longer threatening the border. Two years later, Finland beat Sweden in the ice hockey world championships. (Remember 1980 -- when the Americans beat the Soviets during the Lake Placid Olympics? Multiply that by about a thousand orders of magnitude. Sweden ruled Finland for 700 years! Naked men were dancing on top of police cars in downtown Helsinki!) Esa Tihala, director of e-business at ICL, a one-time computer manufacturer moving rapidly into Web-only e-commerce solutions, cited that moment as another psychological breakthrough point. "We never had won anything, before," said Tihala, his face glowing. "We didn't think we could win anything." But now Finland is winning everything. Red Army Choirs, ice hockey champions, mobile phone megacorporations and open source avatars -- Finland's psyche is in pretty good shape. Of course, the global economy is nothing if not fickle. When stock prices drop on the NASDAQ exchange, stock markets all over the world react in kind, not excepting Finland. But Finland in the 21st century is far from luckless. In today's world, you've got to find your niche, your one thing that you do better than anyone else. Finland's niche turns out to be the network. Not a bad gig, if you can get it. And not a bad way to explain the power of Linux, either. When Linus Torvalds stands up in front of tens of thousands of people at a major computer industry convention, he projects an aura of untouchable self-confidence and yet at the same time an eminently approachable openness. And why shouldn't he? He hails from a nation of cooperators who revere the power of information -- of lore -- in their myths and legends, who seem to be born knowing how to take advantage of the unique potential of the network. He comes from a land where open-source attitudes are as natural as the frozen lakes and endless Arctic nights. The people who do best in a networked world have a great deal in common with
the people who devote themselves to open-source software: they distrust
rigid hierarchies, they thrive on shared information and they are eager to
try new things -- new methodologies, new software, new gadgets, new ways of
doing business. It turns out to be no mystery, after all, that something like Linux and someone like Linus Torvalds have emerged from the "sad country" of the North. It was an inevitability.
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Start at the beginning -- Read Chapter 1 of the Free Software Project.
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