I'd just throw in that if someone uses your code to try to reproduce what you've done, they may actually just be reproducing a bug -- or in the sinister case, r

I'd just throw in that if someone uses your code to try to reproduce what you've done, they may actually just be reproducing a bug -- or in the sinister case, reproducing a faked result. So a more general point in this whole discussion would be that making the code available isn't always as important as making the mathematics or other theory behind the code available, and "reproduction" becomes "reimplementation", or some other corroborating element of the process as described by timr a few comments down (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968456 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968456). (Of course for large software endeavors that isn't practical either. So mattheww's point about trust unfortunately resonates.) As for the proprietary issue, I think sometimes it might actually help reproducibility: if you can just drop a few lines of script into Matlab and examine them, it's potentially a much smaller task with a lot more battle-worn, common-ground code factored out than examining or re-implementing a full library of open code.