Why Your Right to Change and Redistribute Code Matters There are reasons why you want to be able not only to view the source code, but to change it and possibly redistribute it. First, code has to be kept up to date to be worth seeing, and that mech- anism must be public. While only a small percentage of a large code base will have changed after a few months, it will be precisely those few percent that will have had the reported and fixed bugs. Your bug is probably in there as a fix or caused by a fix, and if not it is statistically likely to be dose by because bugs are known to cluster. It is a waste of time looking through old code for current problems. There is other value in old code, such as to see general architecture or coding style or ro learn the application. But for purposes of finding and correcting problems, only current code is satisfac- tory. As a practical matter, this means that some sort of code repository, such as CVS, which supports concurrent source code updates, is needed to make source code sufficiently current.