I wrote to Joerge Ewald, who is in charge of FS:

There was GAP 98, GAP 2000, GAP 2002, and Oz GAP. Those were actually formulas.

The use of the GAP nomenclature (in FS)  actually should be FS 2015, FS
2016 instead of GAP 2015, GAP 2016. IMHO.

A new version of FS that adds additional features (or fixes bugs) to FS, but
doesn’t actually change the underlying formulas.

BTW, no way make paragliding and hang gliding scoring the same.

Joerg Ewald <<joerg.ewald>>
responding:

Thank you for our input. In your opinion, when is a formula an
“actual formula”, and when not? In my opinion, as soon as the official formula
specification changes, then the formula should be clearly distinguishable from
any previous version. And because this was the case for the past few years –
every year the CIVL plenary decided for changes in the calculation – we
introduced new GAP versions.

Of course not all the changes were as substantial as the jump from GAP 2000 to
2002, but since then the specification has evolved quite a bit. Up to 2013 this
was not always obvious, because nobody bothered much about writing it down, but
since then we have an almost-complete specification, where this progress can
clearly be followed. The latest edition (soon to be replaced by the 2016
edition) is here:

http://www.fai.org/component/phocadownload/category/?download=9812:2015-civl-gap-v10

This is about the formula itself. By the way, I have proposed a few times
already to change the name, from GAP to CIVL, or something that includes CIVL,
but so far the Bureau did not want to do that.

Now for the implementation, be it in FS or any other program, I agree, these
should be completely independent from the formula. Whether one implements
GAP2014 in 2015 or 2016 does not matter, it’s still GAP2014, CIVL’s official
scoring formula for 2014.

With FS, to reduce our support effort, we want to make it very easy for
everybody to always use the most current version. Because we have no auto-update
capability right now, we do this by naming FS according to the release year.
This way it’s obvious if somebody uses an old version. The FS version of a year
(e.g. FS2015) generally includes the GAP edition of that year (GAP2015), but
this is not a must. If, for example, there are no changes in GAP in 2017, then
FS2017 will still include GAP2016.

I hope this makes it a little easier to understand.

And there was never the intention to make scoring for hang gliding and
paragliding the same. We have a number of differences, some of which come from
different needs, others – my impression – simply because the hang gliding and
the paragliding people don’t talk enough with each other.

Jamie approached me in Lausanne, asking why some of those differences exist, and
whether the changes we had introduced in paragliding over the years could be
adopted to hang gliding *if they made sense*. So I listed all the differences,
for her and other people from the HG scene to make an informed decision. From
what I was told, the decision was to leave everything as is.

This is of course fine, although at least in the case of distance points, I
think the decision was based more on the myth that has surrounded this
non-linear calculation (“it’s safe, it makes people land in groups”) than on
actual facts. Our evaluation shows that the points work exactly in the opposite
direction, the single pilot overflying a whole group of pilots to land in the
next field gains more in this system than with linear distance points. But
because everybody believes this to not be the case, everybody acts accordingly
and people do land in groups.