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Originally Posted by faust1706
But, FIRST is about learning. If I were to outsource a program of tracking the reflective tape now,
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I agree, and I would not advocate someone releasing their solution to this years challenge. It's your work, I think you should benefit from it for that year's competition. However, I release our team's previous year's competition code each year so that others can build upon it.
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a lot of people would take it, put it on a single board computer and run it without really understanding what it does. It's the same principle as the "learning python the hard way" website. It prevents you from copying and pasting. If you write it yourself, you're more likely to remember it.
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I disagree with this point of view. While you're right that *some* people may just run it without understanding what's happening -- that's their loss, and they aren't going to get very far in life if that's all they do. However, there are some people who will benefit from a fully worked out example to build off of, and it will enhance their understanding of the problem space.
You shouldn't try to decide for others what they're going to do with your code. You can't stop some people from using the code without gaining understanding, but if there's only a few who benefit from the code and get deeper understanding/interest in the problem space, I would call that a win.
A good example of this is our image processing code / dashboard from last year. Team 341 released their image processing code for 2012 for others to use. Having the fully worked out example to play with was a good starting point, and we were able to translate it into python, and take the ideas and expand them into something even more awesome than the original code (IMHO).