[Kevin Sevcik]

I won't really speak to the issue of the NDA and whether it makes sense, as it's FIRST's decision and they obviously have their own opinion on whether rumor mongering and misinformation will be better or worse in an information vacuum... But I do have a suggestion for them and NI, since I haven't seen any indication that someone has already thought of it.

Obviously, they want to get info out to teams as quickly as possible once they decide it's appropriate. Presumably, they want to expedite the training process for teams by requiring the beta test teams to hold seminars and release code and etc. But they must surely know that the training and code releases are fairly meaningless to any teams that don't actually have the coding environment to work in. Trying to work with and learn from Labview code when your Labview install doesn't have the required modules and you don't have the subVIs is about as productive as trying to learn about the .NET APIs by looking at someone else's code in notepad. It's possible, but it's going to be slow, painful, and incomplete. As I recall, it's not even possible to do some of the things you need to without the Labview RT module. So teams giving seminars could be in the difficult position of having to demonstrate everything in step by step cookbook fashion thoroughly enough that the attendees will be successful when they finally have software to work with.

I know FIRST has pledged to get hardware and software to registered and paid teams as soon as feasible, but even then that doesn't help rookies and teams that can't get money right away. Given FIRST's close partnership with NI, though, there's a pretty simple and cool solution. NI has an online demo environment of Labview that's kitted out with every module available. You can't load or save external files of course. But I don't think it would be incredibly difficult for NI to set up a second, FRC only server that's running the version of Labview we'll be using and that's pre-loaded with the default code and tutorials. In fact, you could even update the environment on a regular basis to update the FRC support code, add new tutorials, post beta test teams' example code.... All sorts of things. I, personally, think this would be a brilliant way of making training extremely accessible to any team that wants it and doesn't happen to live near a beta site. Like, london, or brazil, or a rather large percentage of the US.