531CULTURE’S OPEN SOURCESCoding Free Software, Coding Free States: Free Software Legislationand the Politics of Code in PeruAnita ChanMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyIn December 2001, a legislative proposal was introduced to the PeruvianCongress that would have mandated the use of free software on governmentcomputers. The introduction of the bill, dubbed the Law for the Use of FreeSoftware in Government Agencies, or Proposition 1609,1added Peru to a grow-ing list of countries pursuing legal measures for the adoption of free softwareby government. Similar measures had begun in Brazil, Argentina, France, andMexico—and within a year, they would be joined by dozens of other national-and local-level efforts in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Vietnam—all seeking toestablish official alternatives to the use of closed, proprietary software by gov-ernment. But it was Peru alone that uniquely managed to capture internation-al public attention in the work surrounding its legislative efforts. Much of the publicity was spurred through the online circulation of a letter-mediated exchange between Microsoft’s General Manager in Peru—whoattacked the bill as a “danger” to the nation’s security and to corporate intellec-tual property rights—and the congressional sponsor of the bill, CongressmanEdgar Villanueva, who staunchly defended its support. The letters later becamethe focus of a wave of international media coverage around the South Americannation and its legal proposal. Unlike any other nation considering similar legis-Coding Free Software, Coding Free States: Free Software Legislation and the Politics of Code in Peru532lation, Peru’s proposal and its Congressional author were suddenly transformedinto prominently visible players in the global movement for free software. Or asone reporter from the online news publication Linux Today prophetically nar-rated: “In the course of everyday business and politics, once in a while some-thing truly significant happens. At such a time, letters become road maps forchange and a politician from a small mountain town in Peru can become a heroto those who believe in a cause: both amongst his countrymen, and around therest of the world… Congressman Villanueva’s reply [to Microsoft]… raised himpractically to folk hero status over night” (LeBlanc 2002).Envisioning Free SoftwareDespite the unusual media attention captured by the Peruvian legislativeefforts, and the rapidly expanding adoption of similar initiatives by nationaland local governments worldwide, the dominant reaction of free software pro-ponents to the bill in the months following its proposal was to treat it as simplyfurther evidence of free software’s continued global spread. Minimizing thelocal specificity of actors and contexts surrounding the emergence of legal pro-posals like Peru’s, the prevailing reading of such developments in the developedNorth was as one extraordinary achievement within free software’s history ofother, similarly extraordinary achievements. For many free software practition-ers, it was the seemingly uncontainable momentum of their movement and thesheer technical strength of free software itself—more than any particular localactions or activities—that were to credit for its global successes.Yet a closer examination of the practices that surround the emergence offree software legislation in Peru reveals a distinctly different account. Far frompresuming free software’s steady advancement, the proponents of Peru’s freesoftware legislation undertook various forms of local and non-local work, advo-cacy, and activism to propel the visibility of their movement. Further, their prac-tices departed from the language of technical and economic rationality that hadbeen repeatedly invoked to explain free software’s adoption. They insistedinstead on a new framing of free software as necessarily engaged and investedin processes of governance and political reform. And while prominent factionsof free software had previously read social linkages to formal political bodies asunnecessary or even counterproductive, Peru’s free software advocates activelysought to build relations with bodies of governance, demonstrating a willing-ness to engage with traditional political channels. If free software had frequent-ly expressed a confidence that it would and should spread without govern-533ANITA CHANment’s intervention, Peru’s legislative developments signaled a departure fromsuch free market logics and signaled that something other than free software’stechnological spread were of most concern to its advocates. Indeed, for participants who had witnessed free software advance from itsmodest origins as an isolated practice of Northern hackers to a phenomenonwith global visibility and the support of some of the largest technology corpo-rations, the emergence of legislative demands for free software appearedunnecessary. Free software’s rapid transition from the margins to the main-stream of society, after all, had occurred without the aid of governments andwith largely only the support of a network of active, individual coders. Boththe computing industry and free software communities, further, came to posi-tion free software as a species of “disruptive technology” (Christensen 2000)that would inevitably displace outdated technologies. To the commercial soft-ware industry, such a reading signaled the need for dramatic self-transforma-tion and adaptation to new technological environments. For free softwareparticipants, it served instead as a confident reassurance in their current prac-tices, and a sign that all could proceed stably without change. Both framings,however, operated on a degree of technological inevitability, presuming thatit would only be a matter of time before everyone came to see the objective,self-evident rationale for free software’s use. Not unlike discourses around theprogression of scientific facts, free software predicted the stable progressionof what it saw as its inherent truths and technical merit (Kelty 2001).Media coverage on free software legislation similarly advanced its own logicof inevitability. News articles repeatedly emphasized economic rationales forthe state use of free software, presenting it as a drastically cheaper alternativeto closed, proprietary software and stressing that national poverty coupledwith the potential for financial savings drove government interest in free soft-ware (Dorn 2003, Festa