You've already done the most dangerous and daring
thing, tell Statalist that you have gone inside the
code of -outreg- and made some tweaks. Now you are
the most obvious authority in the Stata community
on -outreg-, and it seems to me that the main decision
is yours, not anybody else's.
There are precedents for Stata programs written by
user X being taken over by user Y, the most benign
form being where X feels strongly too busy, too out
of touch with current Stata or too lacking in inclination
to hack at the program and is thus delighted when Y
appears all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and willing to
take it on. A less benign form is when someone suggests
some fixes to evident bugs or weaknesses, but the
original authors are still in evidence and fail to
correct or update their software, and it is not
clear who is in charge, if anyone.
It seems to me that putting your name publicly on
a program implies some responsibility to
explain its use
fix its bugs or misfeatures
keep it reasonably up-to-date
Porting up to a later version of Stata also raises
a question of whether you leave earlier versions
unchanged and/or unsupported. That is
the lesser deal, as many authors simply declare
previous versions part of history.
In this case, John Gallup developed this program while
a researcher at Harvard and it is my understanding that he then
became an independent consultant. He hasn't been
in evidence in the Stata community for some years.
If he were to re-appear, and want his program
back, the two of you would have to sort it out.
It's up to Kit Baum to say what is acceptable on SSC.
StataCorp do host some user programs on their website,
but as -outreg- is already on SSC, that wouldn't
seem to have any advantages.
On a different note, and as a user of neither, I have
to ask what advantages -outreg- has over -estout-?
Nick
[email protected]
roy wada
> Since -outreg- appears to be orphaned, I went ahead and
> updated -outreg-
> from version 6.0 to version 8.0 (some issues with brackets and a few
> outdated commands). Running in 8.0 probably eliminates a
> considerable number
> of bugs related to the internal housekeeping (has to do with
> the maximum
> name lengths). I have not tested all the options, but it
> seems to work just
> fine (tested: reg, probit, xtabond2, heckman, sureg; with options like
> margin, addstat, replace). I will probably make some changes
> to the default
> option, but that can wait.
>
> After I finish testing the whole thing, I was thinking of
> asking the ssc,
> the Stata corp, or someone to consider hosting the unpdated
> version, with a
> due credit to the original author. How does this sound to
> everyone, and more
> importantly, would anyone have a problem with this sort of thing?
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