I am now in Espoo, a suburb of Helsinki, Finland. I will be here for approximately two weeks, teaching a short course on Global Software Management at Evtek. After I got an account at the school, I logged into the system. The desktops are Windows XP, with a Novell authentication layer running printers and shared drives. No surprises there, although I would have imagined that an Active Directory backend would make more sense to have an integrated experience.

The real surprise came when I saw the desktop. Scattered across the XP desktop landscape were a myriad of FOSS applications! OpenOffice.org, Firefox (you may say "Duh!", but I didn't see FF on any university machines in Italy!)  VLC, and a bunch of other utilities. Each account holder even gets a complete Linux-based shell account to log into. In my conversations with staff and students, I found a distinct pride in their starchild, Linus Torvalds. Given that Finland is a small country population-wise (5 million), its uncommon to meet someone who doesn't know about Linus Torvalds and by association, Linux. They may not know the exact merits/demerits of Linux (or Linus, for that matter) but they sure know about the concept of "science as a common good" as one of the economists put it at the school I am visiting.

Speaking of Linux, my Nokia N810 has been an incredible companion during my travels. That blog will be next