Yeah, the "open source" aspect of the old tracker scene is kind of on an entirely different level. Everything, and I mean everything, was there for you to look at, copy, remix, reuse, and repurpose.

Like a certain sample? Copy it into your project.

Wonder how a certain baseline looked? It's right there.

Different musicians had entirely different looks to their musical organization, how they used tracks, what samples they relied on, how they expressed things. And you could see all of it just as they had laid it down.

I'm not sure there are many other production environments where the published "document" has as much internal work product open for inspection as these old files offer.

The other interesting part of it was that it was very much governed by a set of behavioral conventions at the time. No manifesto or political movement, no rules, just concepts of good behavior (give credit to your sample sources, don't plagiarize etc.) Other than that it was just young people doing basically whatever the hell they wanted without anybody to get in their way (for better or worse!)

Totally - the "I like this, how does it work?" Factor is such an amazing learning tool (and a hell of a fringe community builder)

Between mod files and small demoscene programs written in assembler there was so much incentive to improve your skills just in order to _understand_ how a thing worked. Then you're using that new understanding to make new things (rather than copying a set of rote "tricks")