Introducing YellowFruit.

[Whiter Hydra]

Everything is proprietary. I have no interest in changing that, but I still have a very strong interest in continuing to use your excellent software.

So how can you design software that will be aware of tournament formats when such proprietary formats exist? I do not want this program to become useless to me or to anyone else who does not use what's on HDWhite. What provisions will be made for nonstandard or custom formats?

Why are there proprietary Quizbowl formats for tournaments outside of maybe NAQT nationals?

[a Joe]

Everything is proprietary. I have no interest in changing that, but I still have a very strong interest in continuing to use your excellent software.

So how can you design software that will be aware of tournament formats when such proprietary formats exist? I do not want this program to become useless to me or to anyone else who does not use what's on HDWhite. What provisions will be made for nonstandard or custom formats?

Why are there proprietary Quizbowl formats for tournaments outside of maybe NAQT nationals?

We designed ~30 formats that do very specific things that we want (guarantee precisely 10 rounds, since that seems to be the magic number for local teams, always have 5 morning rounds, reduce rebracketings, eliminate carryovers, always have a one game final), and that work very well, are very easy to follow, and guarantee high quality and standardization.

And that's not going to change.

[Auks Ran Ova]

You could always design and implement your own proprietary statkeeping application that you also don't share with the community.

[Ndg]

There will be ways to do things without being locked to one of the standard formats. I'm not pretending to be able to anticipate every possible tournament that someone might run. (Though I'd like to get as close as possible! I'm planning to release a preview of the next version relatively soon and will be soliciting ideas.) The goal is just that for the 95% of people running bog-standard things like "4 groups of 6 into 3 groups of 8", it should be trivially easy and not require the user to do much to figure out what to do.

I don't know what a "proprietary" format is, but if it means it's your intellectual property that no one else can use, of course those won't be supported. (Sounds legally dubious but I assume it's at least theoretically possible to accrue sufficient reserves of money and vanity to find a lawyer to harass someone about it.)

[L.H.O.O.Q.]

As someone who regularly runs tournaments with carryover games (and got burned by them last weekend), this YellowFruit update sounds very promising.

proprietary formats

Sorry, I'm so distracted by this. Are you trying to claim you or the LIQBA have private ownership of certain tournament formats?

[a Joe]

Groan. No, I'm not claiming ownership over anything. People are free to copy me. As long as YFT will continue supporting formats that aren't the stuff on HDWhite, I'm satisfied, and this seems to be the case.

I would be extremely upset if a tool known for adaptability and universality suddenly became not so, and I was trying to get a clarification that this was not the case.

[Ndg]

they are proprietary and very complex

I'm not claiming ownership over anything.

I think you might misunderstand what the word "proprietary" means.