[KenWittlief]

FIRST has no power to enforce any of its rules (well, maybe a handfull can be enforced).

It looks like the intention of this rule is that FIRST wants this years students to write the actual code that will be used in the robot. If you have some really great code from previous years that does PID loops, or tweaks the user interface inputs, what does a new student learn this year if you copy it?

This rule goes back to the age-old question that comes up every year: Do you want your team to have the absolutely most-competitive robot possible, or do you want your students to be involved in every aspect of its design and implementation?

Isnt this the same thing that happens in computer science classes? Every year students have to write code to solve some problem, and usually its the same sort of problem every year. But the teacher /professor doesnt give you code that some student wrote 8 years ago and say "here, run this". Right?

Most students already know what <CRTL><C> and <CTRL><V> do. Learning how to write the SW from scratch is more interesting.

My take on this is, if you wrote the code last year, teach a freshman the concepts and let them write the code this year.