FRC Blog - Some Tidbits Before Kickoff

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Originally Posted by Joe Ross

I'm glad to see that this rule is no longer ex post facto.

Now teams have only 3 days (one of which is a holiday) to make a decision and act on a rule released prior to kickoff (which has never been done before), without knowing the game? But we have a week during build season to do our window shopping on FIRST Choice....

Some teams may want to make a decision about open-sourcing their past designs only after the new game is announced, and I don't in any way fault them for that. It's strategic, and is not uncommon in the business world. But now, the new rule makes it a philosophical decision instead of a strategic one, which I'm not necessarily in favor of.

Also, what constitutes "publicly available?" If it's not posted, but you (or anyone else) ask for it, and I e-mail it to you, is that publicly available? If I post it at some obscure link online that no one will ever find, but is not behind any sort of password or restriction, is that publicly available? What if I sat in front of the grocery store next to the girl scouts selling cookies, and I had a table full of free flash drives with our robot files on it?