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Comment by rasjani | Hacker News Reader

Few foss projects and authors that started in this god forsaken country, Finland:

Linux - Linus Torvalds. Finn Ssh - Tatu Ylönen. Finn IRC - Jarkko Oikarinen. Finn. Dovecot - Timo Sirainen. Finn. Robot Framework - Pekka Klarck. Finn.

And maybe not fortune100 or even 500 companies but companies like Nokia, F-secure, Futuremark have had their global impact. And Yeah. These are old tech already but saying that no innovations came out out of Finland or Europe is just plain bullsh*t.

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I'm a bit familiar with finnish industrial history. Finland has a history of massively innovative companies that were decades ahead of their competition in several sectors. The thing that they did not have, was capital funding, so they could not grow, and experience of global markets to have the know how to grow. So they remained small shops, with one or two big industrial clients who did not care to help them grow, and the world caught up with them.

The ones that managed to grow, are exceptions. Nokia and Kone are probably the more familiar ones (look at the next elevator you ride, there's a 50/50 chance it's made by Kone).

Finland is a capital poor country but rich in ideas.

>Finland is a capital poor country but rich in ideas

You can replace Finland with pretty much any non US country on Earth. I've met brilliant hard working people all over the world. The only thing they lacked to make it big was capital.

Well, depends what you compare with. Most european countries have a rich history of industrialization and colonization and hence quite a lot of private capital. Unlike Finland. Of course, there are lots of other dirt poor areas, but if you compare Finland to the segment where it's usually included, i.e. non-iron-curtain-enclosed European states, then in that category it stands out.

well, you could see Finland as halfway between the iron curtain and not-iron-curtain states. They split off the Russian empire just after WWI and barely avoided being taken back in the winter war. The Baltic states were less fortunate

Also the first graphical web browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise.

But like I said elsewhere, Finland is capital poor so the authors did not have resources or the business partners to move it forward.

Skosmos (used by unicef and EU) and Annif too, both from the national library. https://github.com/natlibfi

In Finland you have quite a lot of people with demoscene background as well, I heard they also have a big imageboard culture.

And this was a reply to climate_realist but somehow the mobile client made my reply a top level comment to OP.

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