Are we permitted to have our code for the Robot be Open Source?
If so, is merging of pull requests and feature requests also permitted?
I’m a huge advocate for Open Source myself, but I’m unsure of the ‘convention’ or, more-so, the rules regarding this in FRC, as this is my first time competing.
Thank you in advance
~Jaci
There’s no rules in who can contribute to your software (though the part where you have to list the cost of labor in the BoM might apply funnily if you hired contractors 
)
Many teams will leave their code up and open during the season. A lot of teams don’t share until after the season for various reasons.
On 1675 we work in a private github repository and make it public after the season once we have (usually) cleaned everything up.
Teams collaborating on software during the build season (or after, for that matter) is a good thing.
I never did much collaboration with other teams during the season while I was on a team, not enough time. However, since then I have assisted a couple of teams from: Oregon, California, and Florida (as well as the two I work as an actual mentor on in Louisiana) as a way to give back to FIRST. I Usually just looking over code and report on bugs (explaining what they did wrong, not fixing it for them). I know there are lots of open source projects in FIRST outside of the robot code.
RobotOpen’s platform is open source. Gluxon has a Driver Station that is open source and you can contribute to. RobotPY (Program RoboRIO in Python) is community developed.
While people may not come by and help you like I have (though usually I am approached for help) you can always ask and people will be happy to help.
I think that collaborating code, is an excellent habit; and using Git is a very useful skill.
The problem is that no one in the team has the patience to learn it. Shame!
I feel like including a git cheat sheet this year in the KOP was genius. I use it already, but only for being able to go back to when it wasn’t broken xD I don’t use any of the branching, pulls, merging, etc., but I may start this year with the useful cheat sheet.
Another great community developed project that I bet many of you use is The Blue Alliance. If you want to help out, you can contribute to the main website (mostly python), the Android app (mostly Java), and the iOS app (mostly objective C).
Think about it this way, the world would not have progressed as far as it has in the past 20 years if people weren’t sharing code and learning from each other.
Shameless plug: Here is a vision solution for this year, it hasn’t been updated in awhile, but it will be tonight: https://github.com/faust1706/Vision-IR-2015