McIntyre and Mosher at the door, hand over the rent.

The Idiot Tracker pointed out that Steve McIntyre is a rent seeker, using Freedom of Information to force others to hand over their hard work

He uses the coercive power of the state to force other people to give him, gratis, the fruits of their labor. He does not produce himself -- he uses the data of others, repackaged and sensationalized, to fuel the hit count of his blog.

and in the comments at RR, Steve Mosher self identified.

So Eli has a suggestion, why don't they bug John Christy and Roy Spencer to release their software? Everyone knows that it is buggy, and could certainly be improved by crowd sourcing. There are some amazing people out there with microwave and programing experience. Eric Swanson, for one, comes to mind. As for Mosher (and McIntyre), in their own words

One can ask all sorts of questions that interest me. And the beautiful thing is that you are using a method that is "accepted" There is no need to re invent the wheel.

perhaps Moshpit will be able to say "For me the approaches of UAH and RSS made sense", after looking at the software. To mix direct quote and paraphrase, he only is

basically interested in creating tools, creating them quickly, getting them into many peoples hands and being able to say with confidence that the code is the same as that used by experts. This is vastly different than independent replication, and I've never pretended that it was replication.

"and requesting the UAH software would be for one purpose and one purpose only. To ascertain whether there was any "value added" by UAH as they had repeatedly claimed. The purpose was not to create an "independent" assessment, although many of us have done that. In short we are likely to find what we expect to find: nothing, no substantive value added by their processing.

Of course some idiots expect that UAH had somehow cooked the data. This was never McIntyre's supposition. This was never my supposition. Quite the opposite. We expected that UAH was overselling the "value" that they added to the data, featherbedding if you like."

As Ben Santer puts it in a recent Science article on climate data

"Reducing this uncertainty will require better understanding of the underlying causes of differences between the UAH and RSS TLT retrievals. To achieve this, full public release of the codes used for generating troporspheric temperature retrievals would be highly desirable"

In Congressional testimony, Dr. Christy claimed that the codes UAH scientists have used in generating MSU-based tropospheric temperature retrievals (TLT) were publicly available. This claim was incorrect. The code for producing the TLT record is not publicly available.

Eli hears that RSS will make a public release of their code. RSS is a private company and not subject to FOIA rent seeking, but Christy and Spencer do/did their work at NASA and the University of Alabama Huntsville. In the words of Mosher and McIntyre, that software belongs to us, we paid for it. The Steves need to force Roy and John to hand it over.

Now Eli, Eli is a reasonable Rabett, he only wants all versions of the software, suitable commented so that anybunny can use it straight out of the box, and, oh yes, a well run ftp site for downloading. Perhaps such a thing exists. Pointers please?