Ethics 101: To re-use or not to re-use?

[ewankoff]

From the way this discussion is going it looks like many people are not looking at the real intent of this rule. FIRST's goal is to teach student about technology, science, and engineering. When a part is fabricated student gain expierience with that part and machines used to make it. The rule inquestion, I beleive, is to force students to learn how to program and create code that works. If a team has already perfected code then this rule does not outlaw reuseing but only forces teams to re-implement it. The re-implementing of the code forces students to figure out how to make that specific code work with this years robot. If a team was required to retype or copy and paste then no-one benefits and does not coincide with the goals of first. The only thing that should be taken into consideration when copying code directly is that students should learn how it works and what makes it tick then the goals of FIRST are being fulfilled.