I defended my master thesis couple months ago in a German University. It's a thesis in Computer Science. In my thesis I mainly implemented some machine learning methods and compared their performance. The implementations of the methods and making them available as open-source are considered one of the main contributions of my thesis. I published the source-code online on Google's Code.
However, recently I was browsing the source-code of two methods' implementation and I found two bugs. One of the bugs makes the results of one experiment useless since the method became simply wrong.
Now I'm very worried about that and don't know what to do or what I must or have to do. (They're not going to take my certificate back, right?)
My questions:
Since one of the main contributions of the thesis is the release of the source-code, am I obligated to fix the bugs?
Am I required to keep my source-code online? In other words, can I now decide to take it down and not give it to anyone? I'm the only one who has a copy of the source-code. My professor never asked me to put the source-code on a CD-ROM and put it in the thesis. I also mention in my thesis the online repository for the code.
I had very difficult memories of academia and I was so relieved when I finished. I don't want to contact them again to tell them about the bugs. But am I obligated to do that? I just want to start a new life and never think again about the past.
I'm asking those questions just to know my rights and if I have any obligations. However, since I'm passionate about my thesis topic, I'm actually considering fixing the bugs but I'm not willing to contact my professor and tell him, simply because I just don't want to communicate with someone from the past and still feel that I'm still stuck with academia or have obligations toward them.
Nobody has used my code yet, so if I fix the bug then the person who will clone the project will get a correct version (hopefully! I mean every software is subject to bugs!).
Edit:
I was asked "obligated by whom?". Well what I'm thinking is that since one of the main contributions of my thesis is the source-code, and since my examiners passed my thesis because it has contributions, then I thought that I must have that source-code always available. It feels to me like a contract:
Make contributions (source-code as the main contribution) -> thesis passed -> you get your degree.
Now revoke contribution -> thesis failed -> you don't deserve your degree.
Isn't it like that?