In this period before FreeSurfer formally existed, there were an array of prominent imaging laboratories that were frustrated and in some cases angry at Anders for not releasing the code for surface reconstruction that he developed as part of his Ph.D. work with Marty Sereno. In my view, this was an unfair expectation, as releasing code without supporting it is never enough. The only thing that makes people more annoyed than not having access to code, is having access but not being able to get questions about it answered, and expecting a single graduate student/postdoc to devote his time to support isn't feasible. Anders, Marty, Doug and I were committed to releasing FreeSurfer, and did so with the help of Thomas Witzel at the Human Brain Mapping meeting in Dusseldorf in 1999, which included Marty writing about 10,000 lines of tcl/tk code in the week leading up to the meeting (this is how csurf was created, which I'm pretty sure only Marty still uses).
