A rather convoluted thread started by this leaves me
with two thoughts.
1. The thread converged on taking a program by Jeroen
Weesie called -tabl- and discussing how to fix it.
At the risk of seeming pompous, I have to protest
at a small example here of some poor practices.
People with long Stata experience are taking someone
else's program, changing it, not changing the name,
and not documenting what it is that they changed, even
to the extent of not knowing how it differs.
You can do this in private if you want, but longstanding
advice is that _you should not do it in public_.
It is not heinous, but it is sloppy and potentially
confusing or irritating.
Here the advice is again: Statalist FAQ 6.4:
"However, StataCorp has nonexclusive rights to any program
published in the STB or SJ, while anything placed in the SSC
Archive is tacitly put in the public domain. In practice, you
can probably take anything published in either medium and
modify it as you will -- especially if you do that privately --
but publicly we recommend that unless you are the original
author, you should change the name of the program, take all
blame for any limitations your changes produce, and imply
that a suitably large portion of the credit for the program
belongs to the original authors."
-tabl- was published in STB-53 and a later version is
downloadable from Jeroen's website. I don't think programs
from other websites deserve a different standard of behaviour.
This revised program may of course get passed on and, who
knows, someone downstream is going to email Jeroen Weesie
and ask him some dopey question about something with his name
on for which he is not responsible. Jeroen is not, I believe,
a member of Statalist, so not able to answer questions about
-tabl- on Statalist, but his rights deserve a little more respect.
