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my friend has developed a CAD program in C, here it is

http://web2coders.jrcw3.com/

i have convinced him to go open source, but we have some concerns:

  • if you upload a project to sourceforge or github would you be able to know who's participating and if his version is good?

  • if you have many versions being developed by other programmers, how to know which is the best version, which has too many bugs and so on, do you have to read every version or is there a faster way?

I really hope that this question will not be closed, because i have asked it in other places and no one answered, so stackoverflow is my last chance to get an answer

  • Yeah the site has an obvious misspelling every 5 words... And why is "company" capitilized, lol. – David Aug 03 '11 at 03:38
  • Linus makes about 1000 merges in a day ) there is no such troubles, just make a code review and sure test it. – cnd Aug 03 '11 at 03:53

3 Answers3

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There is no definitive way to know who is using or modifying your program if you allow it to be open source - however, using GitHub is definitely a step in the right direction. That way, you can see who formally "forks" (starts their own development branch) the project, comments on it, etc.

In the meantime, you should tell your friend to double-check the spelling on his website - it would look a lot more professional :)

mattkelly
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  • yeah he makes a lot of spelling mistakes, although he's from america lol, i think i know why, he's 63 years old semi retired living in portugal so he may have forgotten the language a bit :D and he hates wysiwyg editors, he does everything in notepad so he has no check spelling option to show the red line when you make mistakes :D –  Aug 01 '11 at 22:20
  • @elieobeid7 - A 63 year old forgot how to spell? Tell him to take pride in what he writes. – Ramhound Aug 03 '11 at 11:25
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As for "which is the best version", no, there is no magic way to automatically tell which version of a given piece of software is best.

The best your friend can hope for is that enough people will be working on the project that a consensus can emerge on which contributions are useful and which are not. Barring that, he will just have to make judgement calls on a case-by-case basis.

nerdytenor
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You can host open-source projects and get notifications when people use/fork/comment/participate/download it. Here are some sites.

http://code.google.com
https://github.com
http://sourceforge.com

Also you can put trackers in your code that calls your server when someone uses it, provided there's an internet connection.

Also your website needs a lot of make-up. My 2 kobo.

Mob
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  • it's not my website lol it's my friends site, i even don't know C language and not planning to learn it unless someone explains to me why do you have to write 7 line of code to say hello world! python satisfies me, if you ignore his designing skills, you'll find that he's a software engineer genius, does this website look any better? http://www.python.org/~guido/ i have come to the conclusion that good programmers don't care about design –  Aug 01 '11 at 22:25
  • That's horrible. Most programmers do care about designs. Check stackoverflow or its chat rooms for instance. Its clerverly and beautifully designed. You can learn Java :) its awesome, although ugly! –  Aug 01 '11 at 22:30
  • i know it's horrible lol but hey stackoverflow has web designers, right? he's a lonely 63 years old software engineer! I know that java is ugly, well if i really really have to learn something other than python, i would pick either c# or scala, it's is the hottest new language today! I wanted to learn ruby on rails, but it takes about 10 folders to create a simple project while you can do the same in django with 4 files lol –  Aug 02 '11 at 13:36