[David Kelly]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Seeing various scoring spreadsheets fly around gaining features and fixes has gotten me thinking. Anybody want to speculate on the odds of FIRST just Open Sourcing the scoring software and throwing it at the teams and mentors to check over and debug?

There's gotta be a few dozen qualified programmers in the FIRST community, atleast. I'll grant you that game specific stuff would be tricky. But ranking algorithms and a general scoring database would be applicable from one year to the next, along with most display stuff and arena control stuff. FIRST might just keep one or two people on staff mostly updating the program for the next game, then release the source to teams the same time as they release the game. Then teams and other FIRSTers could check things over in their spare time. The FIRST staff programmer would then be in charge of integrating any fixes or changes. Yeah, I know that teams don't have that much free time, but still. I don't know that FIRST has anything to gain from keeping the code proprietary unless they're contractually bound to do so. Any other thoughts?

That would never happen.