I admit, i didn't write every country in, but I did have to do a fair amount of modification to create a "standalone" list of countries. The fact of the matter is that I found it difficult (well, make that impossible) to find a simple list of countries in a format that could be pulled into a database. So what I've done is create that list from the information already out there on the web and provide it in the various formats, such as CSV, text and the HTML dropdown.
It wasn't rocket science to do but I hope people will find it useful.