What to do with your private project repos?

[ibnesayeed]

Now that the course is over, some of you asked me if you are allowed to make your code public. The short answer is "yes", but read below for more details and caveats.

I generally promote open source and like the development to be done in open, but the nature of assignments sometimes does not allow it. However, I want you all to leverage your code in your future projects and also benefit from it when you go for job interviews. Which means I should allow you to make your code public. We will worry about plagiarism detection and prevention later, if and when the course is offered again.

That said, it will be dangerous to simply switch your existing private repo to public because it has your submissions evaluation reports that will become public, revealing your grades, which is not in the best interest of anyone. I would suggest you to keep your private repositories private and locally clone it, then publish the clone as a separate repository with a different name without mentioning CS531 in it. You may chose to publish just the final state of the project or clone the existing repo with its commit history, whatever works for you (the latter would reflect better on your profile). Additionally and optionally, you may also choose to add a clause in your LICENSE and/or README file to explicitly prohibit the use of your code in any classroom assignments without an explicit permission from their instructor.

Best!