Yes, exactly. All I'm asking for is a literal code and data dump. Take a snapshot of the operating environment and publish it. Ideally as a virtual machine or container image, so people don't have to fiddle with dependencies and versions; but if it's just a file system dump of the code that's better than nothing.
The folks who are asking for this are NOT asking for: (1) production quality code (2) portable code (3) an open source project based on the work (one way code dump is fine) (4) well commented high quality code (5) any support using the code beyond which would normally be afforded fellow researchers in reproducing one's results.
We (me and anyone else who is asking) understand that there may be some circumstances in which not all data can be published due to privacy, or in which code depends on proprietary dependencies that can't be shared. That's fine. Document it if you can as a disclaimer, and people can work on getting access to those private resources if they need to.
Anyone funding research should expect this; and publicly funded research should be required to disclose all technical work product that's materially involved in published results.
That's all great. And when I publish my code and it doesn't work on your machine as it does on mine, what do we do next? When you're saying "should", you should say who's going to pay for this and at whose expense (in money but also in time).
If the virtual machine image you prepared works on your machine and not on mine, I'll troubleshoot it and submit a bug to the VM project. It's pretty unlikely, though - that's why virtual machines and more recently operating system containers are so useful. They are portable. You can even emulate an x86 virtual machine in your browser in JavaScript and boot Linux within it: http://jslinux.org/ - cool, huh? With mature virtualization technology it's possible to take a snapshot of an operating environment + data + program as a portable image, then someone else can boot it into a virtual machine and run it. VMs are mature and run a large portion of the software powering the Internet. Containers are fairly portable as well. See more of my other comments on this topic if you're interested in my ideas about technology specifics and how it would be funded (I'm not saying I have a full plan, just avoiding repeating myself).
The folks who are asking for this are NOT asking for: (1) production quality code (2) portable code (3) an open source project based on the work (one way code dump is fine) (4) well commented high quality code (5) any support using the code beyond which would normally be afforded fellow researchers in reproducing one's results.
We (me and anyone else who is asking) understand that there may be some circumstances in which not all data can be published due to privacy, or in which code depends on proprietary dependencies that can't be shared. That's fine. Document it if you can as a disclaimer, and people can work on getting access to those private resources if they need to.
Anyone funding research should expect this; and publicly funded research should be required to disclose all technical work product that's materially involved in published results.