[EricH]

Boomergeek, I was taking the "copying" to an extreme. As in, I get copies of all your design drawings and all that sort of thing, and build an identical robot, without your permission/knowledge. Building twins without building twins, if you will.

BTW, John was not calling copiers leeches. He was calling copiers who do not learn from the experience of copying/improving/iterating and then pass that knowledge on leeches. There is a difference.

I don't exactly care about whether the copying is with or without permission in FRC--but there should really be some learning to go with it, and some modification based on that learning.

My problem is not with seeing a design and adapting it to fit a current design that someone already has (you still have to do the engineering). My problem is with someone seeing a design and making an exact copy, and not learning why it works the way it works, or what the physics behind it say.

Derive and iterate, instead of copy, is the way to learn. (Unless, of course, you're doing collaboration--which simply means that you're doing a couple extra copies of one particular design, with full participation in the designing by both teams. That brings its own set of problems.)