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Just regarding the numbers of 15% (Guggenheim) or 30% (Simon) to keep variable media variable: Indeed, the step the Guggenheim took is potentially encouraging and does show slowly a change of generations in understanding and acknowledging a change in what it might mean to "run a museum": "the Guggenheim took 15 percent and put it in a variable media endowment. The interest from that endowment over time was supposed to build up and supply a fund to pay programmers to re-create(say) net.flag in a post-Java version, or to update the flags it referred to to match the geopolitical realities of the year 2050." Mind you: it is 15% going into an endowment (!) which is different from a write-off scheme; an endowment in the US may be assumed to yield per year say 5% of those 15% (depending on the money market) - which then is to build up and/or pay for updates/ maintenance/ ports. So if the price tag were $100,000, then $15,000 would go into the endowment, and the first year would maybe yield $700 - $1000. If this would be spent on maintenance (like 5-10 hours of software maintenance or updates per year), the endowment would not increase - and after 8 years you could pay for 3-4 hours of maintenance etc. A full port of a piece to a new environment is probably not possible with such yield - certainly depending on the initial money put aside. I think putting 30% on top of a purchase would be very difficult to do. (Side note: Imagine you would by your oh say van Gogh for $40 million and you would already then set $12m aside for future "maintenance" - actually an intriguing idea! But maybe then there would be no more money left for living artists, because we can only update the old works? Maybe let the old works go away to allow new works to be purchased, which in turn supports living artists? Maybe that is the bliss of digital media - that they simply vanish on their own? And only living artists get supported - and as they die, their work slowly fades away into the digital nirvana - maybe that is the "new" model - which incidentally does coincide with how things were in the pre-museum and the pre-art-accumulates-value world ... - which in turn leads us back to the economic discussion of how to preserve works, how to sell them - and that maybe indeed following the old paradigms of museums is the wrong approach for "variable media". Variability always included vanishing. Excuse this side note as I think it is inappropriate for this forum - I simply could not resist.) Johannes Goebel