Why We Are Making NStrim Open Source for Education

In Q1 2027 NStrim becomes open source for educational use. The short version of why: after a year of running national competitions on everything from our own cloud to servers wheeled into an exhibition hall, it became clear that what stops most schools from having decent coding infrastructure is not the technology. It is the invoice.

What 2026 actually taught us

This year we ran two national competitions across three very different setups, and no two wanted the same thing. Skills Finland's Taitaja ran on our cloud. SkillsLatvia's semi-finals ran on our cloud too, spread across thirteen vocational schools and two companies over six weeks. Then the Latvian final ran entirely on-premise, on server and networking hardware we brought into the Ķīpsala exhibition centre.

That last one mattered more than we expected. A national final is the least forgiving environment there is: no second attempts, no sympathy for infrastructure, and an audience. Running it on hardware in a hall, with the same provisioning and the same snapshots as the cloud, proved something we had believed but never had to demonstrate under that kind of pressure — the platform does not care where it runs.

Which reframes the problem. If NStrim runs equally well on someone else's servers, then the reason a school without budget still loses the first lesson of every term to broken setups is not a technical limitation. It is a licensing decision. Ours.

You provide the infrastructure. We provide the solution.

So from Q1 2027, eligible institutions will be able to run NStrim themselves: on their own hardware, under their own domain, with their own data residency, under an OSI-approved licence. Schools, universities, vocational training centres and non-profit coding initiatives.

Competition mode and live invigilation are included. We debated this one, because it is the most commercially valuable part of the platform — and then decided that a national olympiad should not have to ask a vendor's permission to run. If you are organising a national competition, you will be able to self-host the whole thing, and we will gladly help you run it.

What we are not pretending

Open source is not the same as free of effort, and we would rather say so now than have a head of department discover it in March 2027.

You will need somewhere to run it — container hosts, storage, backups, and a person who gets paged when something breaks at 2am. The AI features depend on paid model providers, so self-hosted deployments plug in their own API keys; we do not ship credits. Support is community support, on public issues, answered on a best-effort basis. Enterprise SSO, managed scaling, SLAs and hands-on onboarding stay in the hosted product, which is how the open source edition gets paid for.

And the licence covers education. Running NStrim as a commercial service for third parties is not part of it.

What happens between now and then

Through 2026 we settle the licence and the governance, and decide how educational eligibility gets verified without turning it into paperwork. Late in the year, a handful of partner institutions self-host a release candidate and tell us everything that breaks. The repository opens in Q1 2027, with deployment documentation and a migration path off managed hosting.

Those dates are intentions rather than promises. We would rather ship late than hand schools something they cannot rely on in front of a class.

If your institution has a hard requirement — a data residency rule, an authentication system, a procurement constraint — tell us now. It is far easier to accommodate before the licence is written than after. And if you just want to know when it lands, the announcement page has a notify-me form and the full detail of what is included.