stephanevdv wrote:

Why should every pilot have his own personal flight recorder?

No they shouldn't. On the other side most clubs couldn't buy it for
the members either. Most clubs are happy to survive and keep the gliders
and other equipments...

This makes the cost of an approved FR (Volkslogger or Colibri or the
like cost about half the price of a 760 channel approved radio set)
much more bearable. In my opinion, it's fully comparable with what a
barograph cost twenty years ago. And nobody complained about that, as
far as I remember.

Those days there was no other solution...

Accepting COTS makes the work of the official observer more difficult -
we use them in local competitions, and they need to be checked much
more thoroughly than IGC FR's. Plus, multiplying the possible types
makes it a real challenge for anybody save true computer nerds to keep
up with all the different connexions, logging software, etc. It's bad
enough as it is, even the professional evaluation software makers have
difficulties in keeping up with it.

OO makes it for free (maybe it costs some beers. It won't make much
more (or even less) work to deal with these "loggers" than with
photo+barograph.

/Janos