Title: The Wall

Dear Francis,

In C Vu 11.6 page 23, you ask for views on code availability on the ACCU website now that the code disk is to be discontinued. Other magazines (MSJ, CUJ, WDJ) make their code freely available, but in these cases the magazines are available through retail outlets and have tens of thousands of subscribers making a members-only scheme impractical. However, they do restrict access to the accompanying articles.

The major question that needs to be answered is "Is there any benefit in restricting access to the code?" If most of the value is added by the articles and comments in ACCU publications, then making the code freely available may encourage people to join ACCU to acquire the supporting information.

If the code is made freely available then there is a possibility that someone who doesn't have a subscription to ACCU will not understand that some of the code presented may be less than perfect. If it is some of my code then you could replace "may" by "will" in the preceding sentence :-). The danger is that someone could use the code "as is" or base their code upon something fundamentally flawed. While people should realise that anything downloaded from the Internet should be evaluated on its merits, I am concerned that having code published by ACCU may be seen as a form of imprimatur. Perhaps the code should be provided with the usual disclaimers - but that seems to be getting a little bit too serious and legalistic.

Do you think that there is enough material to make the annual production of a CDROM a practical proposition? If it had the full text of a year's worth of ACCU publications, code, discussion documents and possibly a tidied-up version of the discussions on the ACCU mailing lists would it be viable?

Catriona O'Connell <catriona38@hotmai.com>

We are certainly planning a CDROM with complete archives of our periodicals. Now I wonder if there is anyone (actually the job is large and probably needs several hands) who could take our present periodical archives - largely in various MSWord formats - and convert them into a more portable electronic format (pdf or html).

What else should go on that CD?