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

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Dave Scheck

Would you think the same way if this pertained to mechanical design? Would you force teams to make their gearbox design public if they intended to use it from year to year? (I know that the software/mechanical comparison isn't easily made, but humor me).

Originally Posted by Kris Verdeyen

Yes.

I agree that the comparison is not easily made, and I've tried, but why not? Year after year, and with nearly every chance they get, FIRST rules in a way that makes the game more competitive, the robots better, the compeitition more fun to watch. Why should completely spilling the beans on last year's robot be any different? It's good for good teams, because it encourages them to continue to innovate, and it's good for struggling teams because it demystifies the champion teams in a way that is bound to inspire them to strive further. It makes the pie higher.

Why is it good to hand someone something on a silver platter instead of making them work to attain it? If you put together all the time that team 254 and it's partners in collaboration have spent developing a six wheeled drive base, I'm sure the figure would exceed the thousand hour mark by far. Why should such teams be forced to give everyone in FIRST a transmission design they can hand to a machinist and get back a week later when it took the original teams a thousand hours to perfect the design?

Now by no means am I against sharing designs. Anyone who wants to know anything about our drivetrain, for example, can feel free to ask me or any other student/mentor about it. I'm sure 968 feels the same way. We'll gladly share pictures, theory on how it works, why we did what we did, what we might change and do differently. However, we are not going to handout blueprints. What's the point of that? What is any student going to learn by handing a sheaf of CAD drawings to a machinist and then receiving a nice shiny transmission back? The answer is nothing. You would be cheating yourself.

FIRST is about learning, and nobody learns anything if teams are forced to share code, mechanical systems, or anything else just to use them again. All that would happen is the original teams efforts are completely ignored and everyone reaps the benefits without any of the work. So much more could be learned by simply approaching a team with a innovative and successful idea and learning about how it works from them, and then implement it yourself.