I hope to release an interactive tool called EtherSim tomorrow* with associated actual whitepaper, yet I'm worried that it will simply get lost in the
new noise of
"whitepapers". Perhaps a there could be a new section of CD called
"open source designs", but in the meantime I think we need to talk about some etiquette for Whitepapers. Teams releasing source code or "designs" (in whatever form) as part of the new <R13> preview can really detract from the actual white papers that have some facts, discussions and analysis rather than being a zip file. This noise has a small but compounding impact on overall competitiveness of new teams.
Things like Beta source code releases, raw tools, etc, make sense to stay on ChiefDelphi. Many new teams come to CD first for ideas, information and examples of what to do. Yet a team's robot source code doesn't belong on CD; it belongs somewhere like GitHub. Many teams already have their own GitHub account (nicely named frc####) with public and private repositories so please feel free to
search GitHub for good examples of why GitHub is so much better for hosting robot code. Discussion of the source code would then happen in the programming forums rather than the unsorted, un-categorized white paper section.
In addition, things like CAD are more appropriately hosted on a team's own website. In the very least, there are also other public places to host like Google Drive and Dropbox. A forum post or image seems most likely the best way to start discussion of particular aspects of the design on CD since there's a picture for everyone to discuss without the need of extra software. Additionally, hosting multi-megabyte zip files of CAD designs on CD simply causes more expense for CD, all just so (IMO) a team can point and say "see, we open-sourced the design".
On a final note, <R13> doesn't say a team must announce their design for the design to be open source. I don't mean this to say that most designs don't have something interesting about them or that a team shouldn't toot its own horn. Rather, I'm trying to drive home the point that the <R13> preview doesn't require a meaningless CD zip file in the whitepaper section.
*Pending some polish. It will be open-sourced on GitHub when I figure out an appropriate way to extract a library of source 1885 wants to use for other projects as well