Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesm
of course i respect your opinion, though let's not pretend that's it's an unbiased one lol. of course tuners are opposed to open source tuning, for the same reason apple is opposed to the emergence of android as an open source alternative.
it is true that tuning has risks associated. all tuning has risks associated. i think anyone interested in involving themselves with open source tuning is aware of this and should probably know more of what they're doing than someone who buys a tune. this is a given.
however the benefits far outweigh the downsides, for those of us willing to accept them. there is no better way to improve a system than through the open collaboration of an active development community. there are lots of folks out there who either know, or would love to learn, how to properly tune an ecu. most of them don't have access to the proprietary tuning mechanisms that companies like ecutek offer. This is aimed squarely at them, the 'makers' of the community i guess you could say.
we now have software that can flash an ecu for $500. soon we'll have similar software that does the same thing for free (with freely available source code). ultimately it comes down to a matter of choice: do i buy someone else's intellectual property (a map) or lean on the community's collective knowledge (the repo) and craft/modify my own? it's a decision we make every day we decide whether to employ a library or write our own, and it comes with risks not unlike those you mention. this doesn't mean it's a bad choice, sometimes it's the only reasonable one.
the point is not to debate open source vs. closed source tuning, as both have their place in the market and can coexist perfectly fine. the market's don't really overlap. someone who would buy a tune usually isn't the same guy that's going to spend 6 hours on a dyno tweaking his map. it's really just about opening up the option and building a community around freely available intellectual property that otherwise would be proprietary. this methodology has a proven track record of creating wonderful things. you'd be hard pressed to offer an example where the profit-motivated, walled-garden approach has resulted in a better product that the open equivalent.
oh, and don't smack talk linux. those numbers are consumer sales and are misleading. you wouldn't be typing on this forum if it (and the open source community around it, wink wink) didn't exist.
open source never hurts anyone, except the guy that used to hold the key to the proprietary box.
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Your points are well made, but I still disagree. And quite honestly, I think this is a much deeper debate than simply the "merits" of an open source tuning community. But obvious bias aside, Visconti earned his place in this community (and the advantages we have) through hard proven results. He is a talent. And it's like I said before,
especially in this industry, you get what you pay for.