Thread: Design Sharing
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Unread 08-01-2004, 19:40
Gabriel Gabriel is offline
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Re: Design Sharing

This is one of the ways FIRST is different from any other type of project.

In a corporate environment, intellectual property and trade secrets make something like design sharing next to impossible, unless there is a clear advantage for both parties. For example, I know a guy who works at Apple, and every time I see him I try to wheedle any sort of information about future products out of him that I can, but he's not even allowed to tell me what PRODUCT he works on. (That or he just likes to mess with me, which is entirely possible) Ultimately, at Apple, or GM, or UTC or any other company profit is the goal, not education.

Unfortunately, most FIRST teams are stuck serving several masters. On the one hand we have to please our sponsors, who often demand that we win, on the other hand we have to follow the spirit of FIRST, which emphasizes inspiration, and education. Sometimes you have to make trade-offs between those two goals. Sometimes you have to choose between a student design that won't work, or a mentor design. Or you have to choose between sharing something that will help the community, but might hurt your team, or keeping it to yourself. However, as the little quote thing on the top of the screen says, engineering is all about trade-offs. You just have to look at each case and decide which goal is more important for that case only. For example, sharing a simple, but useful gearbox design that will benefit rookie teams won't really hurt you. However, if your robots function is to drag goals around the field, sharing the design for your revolutionary goal-gripper mechanism might not be a great idea.
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