Since its inception in 2001, the transmediale software award has sparked an ongoing debate about "software art” and its legitimacy. The idea that artists may not just use prefabricated software to produce something else, but engage with programming and software itself in playful, inventive and critical ways, has caught on and spread over to other festivals, exhibitions and artistic projects. However, there is no common language, identity and network of software artists. Software art juries struggle with relatively small numbers of submissions and mixed-quality Input, while much artistically interesting software - hacker code, conceptual art, algorithmic musical composition for example - is written either outside the art system or is not being thought of as software art by its creators. Will the history of net art (and other process-oriented and conceptual art forms) repeat itself with software art, in the sense that it gets incorporated into the art system before it can establish itself as an artistic practice in its own right.