[tux]

> I can say pretty confidently that we will not be seeing open source scoring software any time soon.

> FIRST will definately be looking at how they are doing things before next season, they may go with a new company they may stick with this one. One problem is that every year they goto a new company, or a new software package or a new system just as the bugs from the old system begin to be worked out.


I do not see hiring a company to create the scoring software as diametrically ruling out open source software. Just make that one of the requirements of the contract.

If FIRST is purchasing software and not getting source code for it, I believe that is a terrible mistake. If they had the source code from the first time they bought scoring software, maybe they would not have had to buy it again (and again, and again). Software without source is just a black box. You will never fully understand it, and you will always need someone else to fix the (inevitable) problems.

> However i have yet to see any home grown system that has the gui, the control of the sounds, and most importantly control of the field boxes that the real scoring system does, and therein lies the challenge. there is so much more to this problem them people realize.

Sure. And Apache when it was first released did not have support for virtual hosts and modules and authentication and ssl and ... etc etc etc, but when people needed those things they were able to create them and add them in.