This study examines how free and open source software (FOSS) change as they are designed and implemented in different countries. Recent studies describe how FOSS has emerged as part of a long history of 'democratizing' technologies. These studies show how FOSS has been designed as the technological extension of particular political values and thus represent a very specific configuration of American libertarian culture and politics. As FOSS is implemented in countries without this political cultural history, however, we can anticipate these technologies to change and even clash with existing values. In turn, this study examines how these values change as FOSS migrates into new countries.
Internationally, FOSS is increasingly deployed in direct association with government policy intervention. Government involvement with FOSS has led advocates to decry such activities as antithetical to the very spirit of FOSS itself. Given this conflict in values, this study asks: (1) How does government policy shape FOSS' design and implementation in Vietnam?; (2) How do the values of openness, freedom, and democracy change as FOSS moves into new countries?; and (3) What other actors and organizations are involved in FOSS' design and implementation and what kind of say do they have in these processes? This dissertation improvement grant will fund fieldwork for one year of two free and open source organizations in Hanoi, Vietnam, one for-profit and one non-profit. This fieldwork will consist of participant observation of software development work in both these organizations and semi-structured interviews with their employees as well as with members of the wider FOSS community.
The proposed research will contribute to a broader understanding of the meanings attached to a technology as it travels to new countries and contexts. Given the particularities of the Vietnam context, the proposed research will also contribute to a broader understanding of how cultural values can cause technologies to change as well as what happens with a technology clashes with existing values.
This project comprises an ethnography of three forms of software: software discs, free/open source software, and mobile phone applications. Copied discs are the primary ways in which Vietnamese consumers obtain software for their computers and mobile devices. Free/open source software have recently emerged as popular tools to circumvent international laws on intellectual property while building on Vietnamese intellectual traditions of independence. Additionally, as Vietnam becomes an increasingly more attractive place for global capital, new forms of entrepreneurial activity, like start-up companies, have emerged, providing new forms of work for the young and ambitious. Vietnam is a place undergoing dynamic changes and these changes bring both new comforts and new risks. As such, rather than reaffirming triumphalist development accounts that assume unabated growth, this project looks specifically at these multiple forms of software to better understand the uncertainty and precarity of trying to negotiate one’s place within a global innovation economy. Overall, the project maintains three analytic themes. First, this project explores the specific material qualities of software. In doing so, this project challenges perspectives from the global North, where ideals of frictionless transaction serve as guiding design principles. Instead, by looking specifically at the context of Vietnam, this project sheds light on technological production in conditions breakdown and repair that are typical of the rest of the world. Second, this project explores the moral anxieties of copying and hacking across the multiple forms of software. By demonstrating the ways that software disc shops are vital sites within a broader ecology of breakdown and repair, this study challenges the view of disc copying as valueless and parasitical reproduction. Lastly, this project explores how entrepreneurialism takes on different forms. Across the shop, the open source project, and the start-up, these three different types of software are made in different kinds of places. At these various sites are different relationships of capital, work, and values. Understanding across these three domains the differing configurations of capital, work, and values will reveal the deeper cultural and structural changes taking place globally as information technologies are increasingly touted as vehicles for progress and development.
