OLC Scoring for 2011

David wrote:
--Noel
P.S. *I know that some of us have made donations to the OLC. *However,
$5 donations by a couple-hundred US pilots do not count much towards
the operating costs of the whole OLC system; especially given the
exchange rate the last couple of years!

Noel,

If you go to the OLC web site, on the right pane you will see
who pays the bills (and funds their retirements) over at OLC.
The sponsors. They are all there, Gold Sponsors, Silver Sponsors
etc. Each can be thousands of $$ a month. Your donations are
peanuts.

Also don't forget that the entity you're probably donating to does not
actually run the OLC. There's "Segelflugszene e.V." where donations
go; but they have no influence on the OLC. The OLC is run by
"Segelflugszene gGmbH", which is entirely different, a company founded
and owned (94%) by Reiner Rose. He is the only one to decide. This
company gets all the sponsor money.

Similarly, given this is a niche market owned by the OLC, which
has achieved critical mass, we can't expect any further
significant innovation from OLC. Why bother innovating or
improving? The pilots will still upload their flights, the sponsors
will still pay.

Unfortunately, if and when a potential competitor would enter the
arena with innovative solutions to the competitors needs, *then*
the OLC would just copy those quickly. So the new entrant would
have little chance for a little market. Looking forward and reasoning
backwards I don't expect any such competitor to bother. But who
knows, maybe? Open source project?

Until then, seems like we are stuck.

We have discussed this on a German forum already, there are a number
of problems with the OLC:

- it is not democratic, the OLC does not listen to pilots, Reiner Rose
decides everything. There has been no public discussion about the
new rules. The new rules were made public only a few days before
the season started.

- new rules don't make any sense.

- pilots who criticize the OLC have been banned for being
"unsportsmanlike".

- Reiner Rose has threatened to remove XCSoar from the list of
approved software loggers, because I have criticized the OLC, and I
happen to be member of the XCSoar development team.

- the OLC watches over their data under the disguise of privacy, which
is bull****: every pilot has agreed to publish his IGC files, there
is no privacy which can be protected. The OLC allows IGC file
downloads only for registered users, and only 10 files per day,
threatens to ban users who reach this limit too often (that's really
written in the OLC rules officially!). Even scientific projects
have been denied mass access to IGC files. (If there really was a
privacy problem, then the OLC couldn't allow you to download a
single IGC file)

The list may not be complete, but that's enough reasons why the OLC
needs to be replaced with something better.

I had a look around and saw there were already a number of rivals
(sis-at, xcontest and a dozen of paraglider contests), none of which
had reached the critical mass. My conclusion was that creating yet
another contest wouldn't help, it would fragment the "market" even
more.

My idea: we must undo the fragmentation. We must bring the OLC rivals
together by merging their flight databases. This is the only way to
ever reach the critical mass.

Let's build a global shared IGC file database. Everybody (individual
pilots, sis-at, xcontest and all the others) may upload any number of
IGC files, and the database allows anybody to donwload any number of
IGC files.

Now the daily score of sis-at would include xcontest flights and vice
versa.

Anybody could create charts of thermal sources, collect weather data,
or just anything with those files (given free unlimited access, some
bright minds would surely come up with more clever ideas). Or just
create a new scoring page with new rules. National contests such as
the German DMSt could feed from this database instead of having to pay
OLC.

Everything open source, of course.

Since both the software and the data is "open", anybody could create a
mirror. A dictatorial leadership like in the OLC cannot ever happen,
because everybody has the same rights, no dangerous power
concentration.

Max