Chess Arbiter Tools were born as a solution to a situation where chess arbiters are forced to use privative software because of the lack of free (as in libre, not as in free beer)tournament management tools. It consists of a group of programs that allows the arbiter to do some important tasks in tournaments, such as maintaining the players database up to date or produce reports.
The philosophy is to provide the arbiter with more freedom over the tournament files. The most common programs (usually privative software) don’t usually allow direct operations on the files, so the arbiter has to stick to the possibilities the program offers. The alternative is to allow the arbiter with complete control over the files during the tournament.
Apart from that, as it happens with any other free software program, if the user is not happy with the way the program does stuff, he or she can just change the code to make it works the way he or she likes.
I wrote these tools to simplify my work in real chess tournaments. It has not been widely tested, although I tested it in a few tournaments successfully. Please send me your oppinions and suggestions if you use it for your tournaments, so that the program can go beyond beta state.