As Kit says, publicly offering Stata code for payment
has hitherto been (almost entirely) restricted to StataCorp.
Some years ago, a British user, not now obviously active
in Stata, did offer diskettes with some of his programs for a modest
charge. I don't know how successful he was or how good they were.
This restriction is of course a matter of fact rather than one of
principle. An optimistic interpretation is that so many
new users who start Stata programming have benefitted so
much from free user-written extras that they feel inclined
to reciprocate.
Nick
[email protected]
Kit Baum
> Another advantage---which goes rather against the open-source spirit
> of Statalist and SSC---is that Mata (like C) makes it *possible* to
> distribute binary-only code for a routine. That makes it
> feasible for
> someone to sell that code. (Indeed, that is the case for StataCorp-
> authored commands like xtmixed). Personally I hope that
> practice will
> not be widespread among the user community, but if someone had put
> immense effort into developing something, they might not want
> to give
> it away (e.g., James Davidson's TSMOD package, which recently went
> from free to a modest charge; the flip side, of course, is that if
> you pay for it you are paying for support).
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