Finland's Summer Coders to Open their Minds (by Paul Sladen)

Many university students will have had the experience of a 'viva', the challenge of demonstrating and 'defending' their final work. For five Finnish Summer of Code students, Tuesday 2nd October will be much the same. They are due to take the spot light and talk about their experiences during the OpenMind conference taking place in Tampere, Finland.

Google's Summer of Code may have taken the limelight, but in the north-east corner of Europe there has been another smaller (near) namesake taking place.

Since 2006, Finland has had its very own Summer of Code—"Kesäkoodi", "summer code" in Finnish—organised and backed with the help of Finnish companies wanting to contribute to the community at a local level.

In its first two years, the Finnish SoC has accepted around half-a-dozen projects each time. This year there were nine finalists, of which five got selected. The hope brought for each project is to create a long term benefit both for the participants and to the wider community.

In Finland, Finnish ("Suomi") is the native tongue for about 90% of Finns (for an example of the other 10%, who learn Swedish primarily, a certain Linus Torvalds springs to mind). One of the famous attributes applied to the Finnish language is that of being highly complex. So complicated I learned, that existing spelling checking programs had never been designed to cope with it.

Indeed, one of the best parts of the discussions I had with the summer-coders was on how best to translate Kesäkoodi. Rather than being a "summer of code", it is apparently closer to just "summer code", akin to the English usage of "summer wine" or "summer wool"—as a lasting product of the summer time.

For 2006, one of the projects focused on creating libraries that could be used to build a dictionary system capable of accurately processing written Finnish. The result being the release of the Voikko project, providing spelling checking and hyphenation for Finnish. Something that might not have been possible without the local connection and the local awareness of a need to be meet.

In the end, the projects for 2007 were chosen without any Finland specific theme this time, but still crossed a wide range of topics. Most of candidates chose to expand features in existing projects. Improvements being received to the vector-graphics tool Inkscape, KDE-based backup agent 'Kbackup', work on JBoss and Exaile (a Gtk+ music player). The most radical project is a tool to enable editing of manual pages—traditionally written in a cryptic format—possible, using a simple wiki syntax.

With the possibility of realising a dream for many—being paid to work on free software—the acceptance and selection of candidates is a challenging affair. Core arrangement and selection of students and their projects has been undertaken by the Finnish Centre for Open Source Software (COSS).

Since 2004, COSS has been working as a government-backed development agency with a remit to actively promote free software and open source solutions within the Finnish business community. The organisation operates on a membership basis, bringing together many familiar Scandinavian names—MySQL, Nokia and Finnish ISP group Saunalahti are present. Closely followed by the local branches of many global companies; Novell Finland, Red Hat, Sun and HP, all of appear in the membership lists.

I spoke to Tuukka Hastrup, one of the previous years participants—who has since got involved with the OpenMoko phone project and started to develop his own business ideas around Free Software. Tuukka described the impact on his existing contributions and his unexpected longer term career direction. "On a projects level, [the summer-code] has kept me as involved as before, and also pushed me into studying and thinking about starting an open-source business".

Hastrup explained that many interesting projects have started from enthusiastic developers with a good idea or an itch to scratch, "I think an important source of Free and open source software should be start-up companies, that grow from the community".

Despite remaining shy, he was equally upbeat about the experience, "I'm looking forward to hearing tomorrow what the summer was like for them. One year ago, I remember staying awake at the hotel trying to make last-minute fixes to my video presentation!". But he wasn't giving any tips for those following in his footsteps this year! "I don't think I'm qualified to give [them] advice on presenting..." he said.

Looking for improvements, I asked, perhaps the event could be bigger? But not everyone shared that view, Hastrup responded again with an in-depth answer showing that he valued the close knit aspect of the event. "A lot depends on the financial side of things. Some more [coders] would be nice, but maybe you don't want it to become too big, [..] it takes a lot of time to run the whole process. Plus there's a certain flavour that would go missing if there were too many projects. For example, we couldn't all present our work in a single conference session anymore". Following on from the opportunity to present, a fellow coder chimed in almost immediately, "That too. I liked the 'real job interview' and all that, so that people aren't just nicks on IRC".

In the audience, there will be many other equally eager figures too, including Miia Ranta, who works for the conference organisers COSS. Over the last six months, she been the one responsible for "managing" the students. Said she was expecting 200 people for the Tuesday technical day that includes the session where the summers coders will present their work. She told me that the next day looks to be even bigger, "Wednesday is about 450 people" counting those that have signed up for the more business-focused afternoon.

Among those presenting will be Ville-Pekka Vainio, one of this summers coders. He has strong views about his favourite programming language and how it lead him to work with a particular wiki system. "Python has become my language of choice", adding "MoinMoin is cool, because it's such clean Python code and doesn't need a lot of dependencies, but it's still a full-featured wiki".

His association with Free content goes further than that, having a belief in open content. "I try to contribute to the Finnish Wikipedia", "The open source model leads to better results and I like that, everybody has a chance to contribute and use what's produced under the same terms". For the moment his project still doesn't have a name, but perhaps the audience on Tuesday might suggest one. In the mean time, apparently, "it's just called the 'maninfo branch' of MoinMoin, that's it".

At the end I asked them if there were any sessions they were looking forward to seeing themselves. With so many speakers to choose from— Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation, Simon Phipps of Sun, Canonical's Amy Jiang and local favourite Monty Widenius of MySQL ...their joint choice is an interesting one.

Hastrup first, "I've been working on OpenMoko recently, so I'm looking forward to hearing their talk". Vainio agreed, "I'm looking forward to hear all the talks about mobile Linux, especially OpenMoko." I'm left wondering if that choice has anything to do with Finland already selling 35% of the world's mobile phones?

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