EcuTek vs BRZ-Edit

[jamesm]

to highlight the point, guys that have ecutek recently were all wondering whether their tune has the transient timing fix in it. i'm pretty sure some people probably still haven't been updated yet.

the guys with brzedit pulled the rom and made the changes necessary.

that is the dependency i speak of. it has absolutely nothing at all to do with the sharing of maps between users.

[Dynotronics1]

Originally Posted by qoncept

No, I didn't say that at all.


I was wondering when you were going to start quoting Ecutek propaganda. It's simply not true. Epifan might (might - I don't know) have, but no one associated with the open source projects did.

I would know. And I spent too many hours of my life for you to call me a thief. I've never even seen Ecutek's software.


It's not about tuning your own car. It's about not paying outrageous license fees and not owning the data you paid for. I'm not a tuner, I'm a programmer and a consumer.

Explain to me how Honda tuners do it. There are a couple professional tuners who encrypt their Hondata maps and tons who don't. How do they stay in business, just giving it away like that? The market is evolving incredibly slow but it IS evolving. There will always be a market for professional tuners, but the market for professional tuners who don't give the customer what they want will get smaller. Proud to say my state of Iowa is mostly free of that.

Don't get me wrong, I did not imply YOU stole anything. But it's a plan and simple fact that the original code for the subi stuff was from Ecutek. I have been in this business for 25+ years, and was there when all this went down, so it's not propaganda, it happened.

For those who wish to work with open source, I am all for it. In fact quite a bit of what I worked with in the beginning was open source, or coding we wrote in house.

How do the Honda guys do it? Well remember that 20% I talked about earlier, that's most of it. Lots and lots of 50$ calibrations out there from folks that think they know wtf they are doing.

Now there are also a lot of hacks that use professional software.

We are more than happy to give customers what they want, and our business does benefit from that. But selling you an open map so you can give it to anyone, sorry, ain't gonna happen.And btw, that's the number one thing we see coming in the shop when a car has been "tuned" by it's owner with an open source platform; "why is my car running like crap, all I did was load a file I found of the Internet"

[qoncept]

Originally Posted by Dynotronics1

Don't get me wrong, I did not imply YOU stole anything. But it's a plan and simple fact that the original code for the subi stuff was from Ecutek. I have been in this business for 25+ years, and was there when all this went down, so it's not propaganda, it happened.

The simple fact is, NO, it did NOT happen. The original code was written by Colby Boles who pulled a rom from an ecu on a bench and reverse engineered it, the same way Cobb and Ecutek did. Why would I lie? Ecutek has big business to protect, I have nothing.

What was (apparently) stolen from Ecutek was a handful of rom definitions and released by somebody who wasn't associated with any of the project. It was quickly identified as theft and removed, but not before Ecutek got ahold of it and put together the document you've been paraphrasing since we started talking about it.

For reference, I think there might have been 20 rom revisions defined in that thing. The current release of RomRaider has hundreds of revisions defined which were found by further reverse engineering. None of what allegedly came from Ecutek was ever released and those roms have all been redefined anyway. There are 8 years' worth of posts on openecu.org and romraider.com you can read through if you want to see the evidence. What's funny (to me) is that Ecutek's rock solid evidence was the identical piss poor naming and spelling of tables.

The corporate bullies are feasting right now that the projects are pretty stagnant. The propaganda and lies only went so far though, so they had to hire away the biggest contributors. One of them offered me a job. Too bad they couldn't pay shit.

http://qoncept.kinja.com/my-bout-wit...ning-453576140

[jamesm]

Originally Posted by Dynotronics1

We are more than happy to give customers what they want, and our business does benefit from that. But selling you an open map so you can give it to anyone, sorry, ain't gonna happen.

again, nobody is asking for an open map. we want to own the ones we paid for, that is all. we need end-user access so we're not stuck coming back to you or another ecutek vendor when we have a problem. i'm sure it's great for business, but it sucks for consumers. this has nothing at all to do with whether or not it's 'open' in the sense that it can be shared between vehicles.

it's a whole 'nother debate as to who truly owns the result of the work i paid you to perform. i believe i do and should be able to do with it as i please, but that's an entirely different matter.

[jamesm]

Originally Posted by ft_sjo

I find it pretty disrespectful when you get a bunch of open sores/laptop warriors who think they're tuners/engineers and then bitch at professionals for not wanting to share what they may have spent decades learning.

And no, most commercial products you buy today are not 'open' for you to modify.

i've spent 20+ years learning to write code. does that mean that if you hire me for a project i should own the rights to it when it's all said and done? of course not, the man who pays does. i'm not buying his expertise, he's not teaching me anything, i'm paying him labor to use his expertise to produce a product, for me.

it'd be pretty prick of me to encrypt the files as to ensure that you had to pay me (and not anyone else) to make any further modification later on, wouldn't it?

[CSG Mike]

Originally Posted by ft_sjo

No, the dealer can't do it. Which is why I specifically mentioned Denso. Even Toyota probably don't have the kit to do full-on forensics. I do have some knowledge in this field.

I have a friend in electronic forensics. He can identify alterations in automotive applications with ease...

It's not a matter of not being caught, as much as the dealer just wanting to collect payment for warranty work.

[ft_sjo]

It has to be a substantial claim for the OEM to really kick up a stink about it and spend money on forensics.

[ft_sjo]

Originally Posted by jamesm

i've spent 20+ years learning to write code. does that mean that if you hire me for a project i should own the rights to it when it's all said and done? of course not, the man who pays does. i'm not buying his expertise, he's not teaching me anything, i'm paying him labor to use his expertise to produce a product, for me.

it'd be pretty prick of me to encrypt the files as to ensure that you had to pay me (and not anyone else) to make any further modification later on, wouldn't it?

That's an unfortunate opinion you have, especially as it's your time/skills which you appear to be happy to give away.

A reasonable analogy could be some commercial software, let's say SAP CRM. It's closed, proprietary software yet you can pay a consultant (SAP, whoever) to customise it for your needs. You don't own the core product source code, nor do you own the customisations. You don't actually 'own' anything - you are paying for functionality. How you get to the that functionality is neither here or there.


The problem here, and I see this a lot with wannabe tuners, is a case of what they don't know is what they don't know, and it's this stuff which some tuners want to protect. It enables competition which is healthy for business. You shouldn't blur the lines between professionals and amateurs. Sure, some amateurs are happy to pretend to be professionals and behave like amateurs but that doesn't change the fact that if a proper tuner/business has spent a lot of hours figuring something out, working around a problem, introducing some new behaviour which improves stuff, why should they share with the world exactly how they achieved that? Just so the next amateur or tuner can steal that and profit from it?

It's about time the internet tuners realised that there is more to a calibration than just setting your air:fuel ratio and spark angle. Any monkey can do that. That is not what tuning a car is about.

[jamesm]

Originally Posted by ft_sjo

That's an unfortunate opinion you have, especially as it's your time/skills which you appear to be happy to give away.

A reasonable analogy could be some commercial software, let's say SAP CRM. It's closed, proprietary software yet you can pay a consultant (SAP, whoever) to customise it for your needs. You don't own the core product source code, nor do you own the customisations. You don't actually 'own' anything - you are paying for functionality. How you get to the that functionality is neither here or there.


The problem here, and I see this a lot with wannabe tuners, is a case of what they don't know is what they don't know, and it's this stuff which some tuners want to protect. It enables competition which is healthy for business. You shouldn't blur the lines between professionals and amateurs. Sure, some amateurs are happy to pretend to be professionals and behave like amateurs but that doesn't change the fact that if a proper tuner/business has spent a lot of hours figuring something out, working around a problem, introducing some new behaviour which improves stuff, why should they share with the world exactly how they achieved that? Just so the next amateur or tuner can steal that and profit from it?

It's about time the internet tuners realised that there is more to a calibration than just setting your air:fuel ratio and spark angle. Any monkey can do that. That is not what tuning a car is about.

the point is somebody owns the software, and it's the person (company) who paid to develop it. i work for a large software-as-a-service company now, so i'm familiar. they (the company) pay me an hourly rate to produce their product. the guy who pays for the work owns the fruit of it. that is my only point. if i pay a guy hourly to develop a map, he shouldn't then be able to enforce restrictions on my property that require me to go through him for any further modification to it.

tuning is not software-as-a-service. i'm paying a contractor to produce for me a product that i need to own for practical reasons. for the exact same reasons enterprise customers have on-property enterprise github servers. i need to be able to fix things myself, without an external dependency on someone else.

no one is attempting to blur a line between 'amateurs' and 'professionals'. there will always be a market for professional tuning on a dyno. this is about breaking the arbitrary restriction that requires customers to return to a chosen vendor when changes are required. it's about avoiding lock-in.

ecutek makes the argument that we can't edit our own maps because somehow that inhibits their ability to secure IP, which has been restated over and over here as if the two are related. they of course are not. they don't want us editing our maps because those of us who can would then no longer need to pay ransom to their tuners when we need to change something. it's a money grab. it's all bad for consumers.

if you don't see the problem, you will in 5-10 years when you need to change fuel injectors or something and you can't get ahold of that guy you bought a tune from 10 years ago.

[ft_sjo]

@jamesm I think you're trying to apply the environment you live/work in to something unrelated. I find this pretty common with software developers. It's not really relevant.

Your point about a 'locked in' tuner not being around in 10 years is valid. And the answer, tough shit. After ten years you'll probably need a complete re-tune anyway so find someone else. Be realistic.

[Dodzilla]

lol, the answer isn't "tough shit" the answer is to explore alternatives to EcuTek.
That's sort of the purpose for this thread existing.
Some of us want a different option than "tough shit".

[qoncept]

Edit: I'm getting in to a conversation I've avoided for 5 years. Nevermind.

[ft_sjo]

Some people are crying because they want their cake AND eat it. That's not life, grow up and realise it. You can't have all you want.

[qoncept]

Originally Posted by ft_sjo

Some people are crying because they want their cake AND eat it. That's not life, grow up and realise it. You can't have all you want.

I already had my WRX professionally tuned, I have the rom sitting on my hard drive and I can browse through it and do anything I want with it. The more I bring it up the more people realize they are the customer and can decide which tuners they want to give their money to and who they should. You may be a lost cause but there are plenty of other people.