F-Secure’s location service source code will help spawn new location innovations in the open source community and with leading universities.
F-Secure has contributed the source code of its ramped-down location 
service, F-Secure Lokki, to the open source community. The donation makes it possible for anyone and everyone to freely use the software in their possible new location services and apps. It also creates an opportunity for forming an open source community around location sharing with security and privacy in mind.
“Like most tech companies today, F-Secure benefits from the use of open source in our products,” says Harri Kiljander, Director, Consumer Security at F-Secure. “It doesn’t make sense to reinvent something that is built by talented and passionate people and proven to work. Therefore we also like to give back to the community, so others can use our building blocks to innovate. With open source, everyone benefits from sharing the development effort.”
F-Secure launched the Lokki location sharing app for families and other privacy-minded groups in 2013. In late 2014, in order to better focus on other services strategically closer to its security and privacy agenda, F-Secure decided to ramp down Lokki as an independent service. Through the open source initiative the Lokki technology will continue to live on and possibly power new location service innovations by students, startups and mobile service developers, and offer a research platform for academic partners.
The Lokki open source project is already being used in an Open Academy project with computer science students from the Software Factory of the University of Helsinki, the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“The collaboration with Software Factory helps Lokki become established as an Open Source project,” says Fabian Fagerholm, who coordinates the Software Factory at the University of Helsinki. Software Factory is an experimental software R&D laboratory aiming at stimulating education, cross-disciplinary research and high-expectation entrepreneurship.
“We believe in the spirit of openness and freedom of the Internet,” says Kiljander. “While Lokki as an F-Secure service came to an end, we’d like to give back and hope that its technology can enable something new.” Lokki had been developed as an ‘internal startup’ partially within the Finnish national research programs Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud Software, supported by Tekes and coordinated by DIGILE Oy.
F-Secure has now released the Lokki source code for Android, iOS and Windows Phone apps and for the secure server as an open source project at https://github.com/f-secure/lokki.
