Distributing quality-controlled software via the internet

Abstract We describe in this paper an archive of software which has been established and made available to users of the Internet. The archive was establishde initially as a collection of public domain software, made available to users at no cost. Use of the archive has grown rapidly: it now contains over 600 items, and withdrawals take place to some 50 countries world-wide at a rate of about 40,000 items each month. We describe here the organisation of the archive and summarise its contents. A particular aspect of this has been our aim to define qualitative criteria for the inclusion of software in this collection, and we discuss our approach to this and other issues.