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Open Source.
Some theorist would argue
that when the corporate media companies started
to vigorously prosecute file sharing in appropriation
that this forced many new media practitioners
to rethink their methodologies and refocus the technique
of appropriation on alternative models for producing
and distributing their work.
New media practitioners began to embrace an ethic borrowed
from open source software movement
that freely distributes software to anyone
under licensing conditions
that stipulate the program remain free.
Another and perhaps more revolutionary aspect
of open source software development is
that programmers collaborate on improvement and features
on the software application.
This means that a given piece of software is constantly improved
by a distributive group of people, who all agree
to rerelease the product as open source to the users.
The motivations for sharing software overlap in many ways
with the motivations of artist and other cultural producers,
in that both groups work hard outside the traditional economy
and gain altruistic satisfaction and peer recognition
as the measure of success.
Both the open source software movement
and the new media art movement shared collaboration
as a central methodology, intimately involved the Internet
and are motivated in large part by fellow practitioners
and not economic gain.
Artist's part of this movement tend
to appropriate found material
and may even make their work available on some variation
of Creative Commons license like share and share alike.
Examples of artists who open their source are Cory Arcangel,
who's Super Mario clouds used found software
to remove everything but the clouds
from the classic video game Super Mario Brothers.
He then released information
on how others can do the same thing.
Racial software groups,
Carnivore is readily downloadable on their website.
Raqs Media Collectives', Opus is also downloadable.
Even Franko Mats opened up their hard drive to the world
in Radio Qualias, Free Radio Linux broadcast to computer,
text to voice reading the Linux code for the kernel
of the Linux operating system.