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How can I show that a given open-source project does not exist yet? (feddit.org)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/ask_experienced_devs

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I work in research (uni) and am writing a framework for heat processes to optimize their costs. This goes both for private houses and industrial processes. The goal is to enable industry players to see that/when renewable energies and heat reuse with heat pumps are cheaper than fossil fuels. I do this using digital twins for components and on a system level.

My boss hesitates because he thinks this must already exist. I want to pursue that path with my research, so any insights there are welcome, too, but this is primarily about the open-source project.

I searched GitHub and came up empty, but that is only a subset of the search. Do you have any idea how I can find this, one way or another? It would also be great if I could show that it likely does not exist.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

One of the basic rules is that "you can't prove a negative". You can only prove it by it contradicting something that has proof, which isn't gonna work for something like this. As a plain example: you can't prove you were not at McDonald's at 8 o'clock last night, but if there's video of you being somewhere else at that time it proves it only because it would require you to be in two places at once.

So the best you'll probably do is promising really hard that you did your best to look for it? The problem is that it may well exist, but hasn't gotten any traction and might be a 1 person thing in some repo somewhere, undocumented and badly searchable with a bad project name.

[–] JackbyDev 4 points 2 months ago

It's probably like a good faith thing. Like if you show you made some effort but it ended up existing then that's not your fault.