Hi Alexander,
Sorry for my late reply (I am adding the Dynare developers list to the discussion).
Le mardi 16 juillet 2013 à 14:02 +0200, Alexander Meyer-Gohde a écrit :
Please let me and my coauthor Hong know what we need to do to get our nonlinear moving average software distributed with Dynare. As you indicated, we would have to maintain our contribution and we are more than willing to do so.
Thanks for proposing to contribute your code and take care of its maintenance on the long run.
Here are a few points that should clarify the way forward:
- your code should be added in the Dynare source code as a new subdirectory of the contrib/ directory, for example in contrib/nlma/; this new directory would be added automatically to the MATLAB path by Dynare at its startup
- our preferred way to work with you would be through pull requests on our github repository (https://github.com/DynareTeam/dynare). This is the system that minimizes the transaction costs on our side, but it requires you to familiarize yourself with git and github. Don't hesitate to ask for more explanations. If this is too complicated for you, we can nevertheless organize another system.
- your code currently works as a MATLAB command that is called after stoch_simul. We should probably think about a better interface. The ideal way would be to have your algorithm as an option to stoch_simul that would *modify* the way IRFs and policy functions are calculated, but this may be complicated to achieve, especially since as I understand it, your policy functions have a different representation. Another way would be to keep a separate command as currently, but to add it to the native Dynare language (so that you would no longer need to manually pass M_, options_, etc)
- once the above point is settled, we should document the command/option in the Dynare reference manual (see doc/dynare.texi in the source tree)
- your code is currently under an ad hoc free software license; it is bad practice to use non-standard licenses, since their legal consequences are not as clear and well-known as those of standard licenses. I suggest that you use a popular free software license. For our Dynare code we use the GPL version 3, but otherwise BSD or MIT would be ok. Of course you can keep the copyright on your code. You should nevertheless add years in your copyright notices to make them binding.
Best,