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Comment by idupree | Hacker News Reader

I was tempted until "We ask you to agree, when you start the course, to not release your toolchains source code anywhere but the cppgm site.". Interesting work I do not-for-pay I release as FOSS on github. They're worried about plagiarism (which is fair); they should use anti-plagiarism tools to check whether submitted code matches previous submissions or any known C++ library and compiler code in the wild.

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You could write your own C++ compiler from scratch outside the scopes of the course, and open source your work on github.

That will show them!

I don't think that is that crazy. I'm not saying you are this exactly but I'm saying this position, to me, is one of an ideologue. I feel that I am an intellectual "friend" of FOSS, to be sure, but I just can't bring myself to take the ideology to that serious of an extent. Also, anti-plagiarism tools aren't very good, like Berkeley MOSS. I mean they are great and everything but easily bypassed.

Given the amount of work this project is, I would presume that very few people will get anywhere near completing the course. So it doesn't seem impossible for the people running it to study the submitted solution in some depth and compare it to earlier submissions by hand.

It's largely practical; I like being able to discuss what I've done with people, including specifics. I make exceptions, but the amount of work that goes into writing a compiler is probably worth more than a certificate is to me. A compiler project would definitely produce things I'd want to discuss with folks and code I'd want to reuse in later projects. One benefit I find of releasing something as FOSS (when permitted to do so) is that I know I'll be able to reuse it later[].

[] (this bit of reasoning deserves more explanation than I've given...)

They do not want student to copy on each others before deadlines. Even latter, if they want to give the same course a second time, they need students of first session to never publish their homework.

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