agreed, I have spend the past couple of decades in the software industry. I agree with you 100% that you can't typically reverse engineer pure software (like EcuFlash ) software that is embedded or runs firmware is treated differently since it is considered a component of the larger piece of hardware, and there are provisions in DMCA that allows for reverse engineering in limited circumstances.

 

Yes, but the car is more popular because it can be tuned easily and relatively cheap. But: just cause you buy a movie doesn't mean you own the movie itself, you just own that specific disc (that the movie happens to be on); it's kind of a similar deal.

 

I agree with you guys, and i do apologize. I failed to mention credit towards the ecu developers in this thread. I have expressed my appreciation to them in many ecu related topics. But again, i failed to mention it in this thread. We are in no way trying to take credit for the patch, we are simply offering the service. I have donated to the developers in the past, and my original plan was to set aside money from each SD conversion to serve as a donation, but i wanted to keep a fair price. Let me give you guys the break down so you can see that we really are not profiting off of this.

price is $599
-$150 for the parts.
-$50 for the installation of the map sensor, welding and installation of AIT sensor, and wiring into ecu.
-$100 dyno time
-$300 Full custom tune. not just converting to SD. this includes 3-4 hours of road tuning, followed by dyno for WOT tuning.

We charge $350 for a standard tune. Subtract the $200 from the SD package for parts and labor. you are left with a $400 tune. there is $50 left on the table which accounts for the 3-4 extra hours of tuning involved in SD. I think that is pretty fair.

We are not selling the patch that was created by someone else. the patch is free, and readily available to everyone. Its the tuning that is involved in getting the car to run correctly. To those that may not be familiar with the patch, so you know, you cannot simply load the patch and be on your way. the car has to be logged, tuned, logged, tuned over and over until everything is in check. Now if it was just a matter of loading the map, charging the customer and sending them on there way, that would be a whole different story.

Again, i apologize for the lack of credit to the developers in this thread. i will change that asap. thanks for your time..

-diiirk

 

WHERE DO YOU SEE THAT QUOTE?? The STOCK ECU will NEVER AMOUNT to anything??? I know i didnt say that.. However i still agree that in a car that is at the level the top 10 cars require a standalone ECU.. It would NEVER work for my DRAG car the way a Haltech Ecu does..

Mike

 

You had made some comments in the past about its abilities past a certain point, but I apologise it wasnt you that had made that comment. I got a wire crossed and made a mistake in remembering who it was. I have edited my posted.

Sorry

Aaron

 

I agree. Its a matter of giving back as much as you take/borrow, showing appreciation for someone elses hard work, answering questions, helping with problems. I mean I am not going to even begin to think about what life would have been like without Colby taking the first step. Then John, Dave, and Eric started doing some stuff. Mychailo and a few others picked it up as well, and then you have guinea pigs like me testing testing testing.

My Evo would have ended up like my STi I am sure, a slow racecar always wondering about knock. Then again it was an Autronic so I may have had most of that coming.

 

I was speaking directly towards vendors like yourself when I stated that. You do your fair share of testing and trying new things and using your dyno time/experience to help us out. Especially when it comes to helping make the stock ecu act like a standalone speed density ecu and how to make it easy and intuitive to use. That is appreciated. I think TTP also provides some good input. That's all the vendors I can say that about.

 

I think you were confused with dave when dave buschur said "I do not tune/recommend any injectors larger than 680's on the stock ECU, especially with larger cams too."

 

Only just noticed this thread since I pop in less often now I am in GTR land and working on that ECU for Cobb.

I didn't take a cent for any tuning or coding work I did for Evos, as it was for the love of it! I wish every success to any vendor that can wrap developmental stuff neatly and market it to customers.

I always found licensing of open source work more complex than the work itself and never bothered. Maybe I broke rules because I didn't put credits to the original authors in my stuff, although I don't think the modified Mitsi ROMs or Ecuflash were under GPL as there was no source code?

Anyway, I'm cool with it, appreciate the credit on the vendor's page, but really I wouldn't have demanded it at all.

Wish I could sort these driveability issues, but I didn't notice them on JDM ROMs including lots of daily driving, and I just don't have the time now to look at it and have forgotten a lot as my head is crammed with the GTR project. I think it needs someone that understands the code to be able to play on a US car live to test it.

Has anyone thought of using my JDM ROM on a US car? I made the reverse work and put details as has logic on here somewhere. The US ROMs have all sorts of weird code in them, the JDM ones are far more tolerant to changing things, probably a better based to work from as you guys have sorted all the OBD reports.

 

We can get even more techinical here and skip the OBD2 (logging) and MUT protocols (logging and flashing?) as I noted in one of my earlier posts. Those are really just protocol transports and they aren't techinically useful to this discussion. What would be useful is whats on the other side of those protocols i.e the software. Thats whats evern more interesting than even who makes the chipsets.


E.g Intel makes the boards that go in many PCs (chipset) but they have no claim as to what runs on them. Its really who owns the rights to the software that is important and relevant to this discussion. Whether that is a 3rd party, Mitsubishi or who, someone wrote it, someone wrote it and someone owns it. Whether that person has the ability to legally prove they originally owned it and can pursue other folks over using it is another discussion for another time.


As silly as this would sound would you believe that a patent troll company out there owns the right to how data is stored in XML documents and has thus sued and won against MS Word (and by defacto can now use that victory to go after everyone else who uses XML document including if there was enough money it in the same creators of ECUFlash and EvoScan)? That is actually the perfect real world analogy to this, and has been help up by the courts so far. The whole problem with the IP world today is the definition of what is vs what isn't IP. Techinically had BK really been the first one to come up with the idea and locked it up using some form of license/patent/copy rights then they could legally be hunting down anyone and winning .

That's why we (in the business) have been pushing for IP and software patent reform for some time now. We have gotten to the point where it is almost impossible to properly innovate without some other company coming along and claiming that you infringe unpon an idea (not even product) that they claim to have had for years and never acted upon.


Yes, everyone here to some extent is saying things that have some truth in them, I'm just trying to help along the discussion and shed some light on the very dark corners that some outside the field don't fully understand .

 

I see a few more posts I'd like to comment on. But I'd rather not derail this any further. Instead what I would like to suggest (and what I've wanted for a long time) there is a clear new thread that explicitly dives into the the rights of the people here who are putting their effort into the development here. I think going forward understanding who can do what with what would really avoid these type of threads.

We have people of many walks of life here, lots of software and legal guys hiding out on this forum. I'm sure we can work something out going forward even if it means puting some of this stuff under GPL or other public licenses.

 

Well said!!!

 

Thank you for the response as well as your work.

oxdead, what else is there to discuss based on this post?

 

jscbanks is the man. If he says he is fine with it then it is fine.

 

Then gentlemen, I propose we have this topic closed and possibly stickied for future reference should the issue happen to come up again for some random reason.