Amendments to Desgin Philosophy (re: CubeSat) | General | Forum

As most people are probably aware, a current stumbling block (perhaps the only one?) with regards to CSTART "adopting" the Reddit CubeSat project, is a small problem with the wording of our Design Philosophy.  In particular, this stuff:

Use off the shelf solutions wherever
possible

The only reasons to build a solution ourselves are:

• Nothing on the shelf is appropriate for the job. Usually this
  will happen with things that need to work in harsh environments (vacuum,
  extreme temperatures, radiation exposure, etc.). In this event, we
  should consider modifying an off the shelf solution before building from
  scratch.
• We can do it considerably cheaper/lighter/more reliably than
  anything on the shelf.

Since there exist entire CubeSat kits you can buy off-the-shelf and build, the Design Philosophy could be interpreted as telling us that we do exactly that.  Obviously this contrasts with the idea of the project being open source.  The questions are:

• Do we want to change the wording of the Philosophy to explicitly exclude the case where an entire project solution is available off the shelf?  If so, what should we change and how?  Or…
• Do we want to leave the wording as is but add a disclaimer to the top of the page saying that it's okay to bend these rules where there is an obvious conflict with the Social Contract (i.e. make the Social Contract "more important" than the Design Philosophy)?  Or…
• Do we want to just ignore this as being a place where it is obviously
  okay to bend the rules and not change anything, but assure the CubeSat guys we'll let them design a system of their own?

Changing one of the Official Documents is something of a big deal so we should discuss this and come up with something that all/most people are happy with.  It would be nice to see this get cleared up soon so that we can go ahead with integrating the new project.