Pro Tuning license

[DURAtotheMAX]

I went to buy a license for my V2, and saw the obvious scanning/logging, GM tuning, and Cummins tuning check marks.

But whats the "pro tuning" option? Something that hasnt been implemented yet? At first I thought it might be something to do with stream licenses, but I already own a couple stream licenses, and the "pro tuning" shows a red X....so obviously thats not it.

Just curious...

Ben

[GMPX]

It is a future feature, but no details just yet :sly:

[ScarabEpic22]

Interesting... :D

[catman3126]

Sub'd

[Highlander]

I want it! I want it NOW!!!! LOL...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFDcoX7s6rE

[Highlander]

EFilive is so freaking powerful.... I can't wait to get more tricks available to us real calibrators

[GMC-2002-Dmax]

Its gonna be epic..........

[catman3126]

When will this license be put into effect?

[GMPX]

No firm date, but one of the features we had planned has been pushed back until early next year.

[BigCE]

Any update on this yet?

[Duramax 6.6L]

Waiting for info

[DMan1198]

In because of curiosity

[GMPX]

We were all ready to go on this but our US lawyer made the process very difficult to sign off on (probably with the right intentions though), apparently suing people for your own mistakes is quite popular in the US :laugh:
Not sure what we are going to do at this point.

[cindy@efilive]

Nothing further to share at this point.

Cheers
Cindy

[Taz]

We were all ready to go on this but our US lawyer made the process very difficult to sign off on (probably with the right intentions though), apparently suing people for your own mistakes is quite popular in the US :laugh:
Not sure what we are going to do at this point.

Ross - thank you for the effort, no matter the final outcome. I was hoping this may have been a resolution to the current *.cax file restrictions - running two versions of the software on two separate interfaces is a time and resource drain.

Our current societal climate (at least in North America) will no doubt go down in history as the complete failure of the "everything is OK" social experiment - which was intended to bolster self-esteem and diminish the potential abuse of the individual. The actual result was the production of a generation(s) of maladapted children masquerading as adults.

I miss the seemingly long gone era of the responsibility of the individual ....


Best regards,
Taz

[Highlander]

So that means, if i take a blow torch to my car and light it on fire i can sue the creator of the blow torch?

[Mitco39]

You know how in other parts of the world they have billboards for stores, car companies, clothing companies? Well in the US its billboards for attorneys and lawyers. Its one of things you really notice driving down from Canada.

[Highlander]

Damn right... i saw one the other day that said:

Just because you did it, doesn't mean you are guilty.

[KhakiCummins]

So that means, if i take a blow torch to my car and light it on fire i can sue the creator of the blow torch?

And the car manufacture because it caught on fire... LOL!!!

[GMPX]

Ok, hypothetical scenario....

Tuner with a pro license bricks an ECM because the .cax file he created was invalid and corrupted the OS.
Problem is the owner of the vehicle was going away on a family vacation that night and now they are stuck at home. Car owner gets in to a fight with the shop owner over this and says he is going to sue over stress of missing the vacation, blah, blah...
Tuner goes to a lawyer (that he saw on a billboard) and explains the situation, lawyer says well that isn't your fault, EFILive gave you the ability to do what you did, lets sue them.......

Sounds crazy, but then so is suing McDonalds for making your coffee too hot (which we all know has been tried)......Taz you are right, 'responsibility of the individual' disappeared 10 - 15 years ago.

As much as we had a laugh about all this the reality is that when a US lawyer is telling you this stuff you have to believe such stupidity is a possibility. Even to the point that a signed waiver still isn't enough!

[GMC-2002-Dmax]

Lawyers............the reason things cost so much, because always someone is trying to sue you for their own stupidity.

Darwin would be rolling over in his grave.

[DMan1198]

The comedian that hypothesized taking all the warning stickers, and safety things off of everything, and letting natural selection take its course might be on to something

[Blacky]

Got to love those wrning stickers, some of my favorites: http://mistupid.com/people/warnings.htm

Meanwhile back to the "Pro Tuning" option. We are still looking at how to provide the Pro features to Pro tuners who need them and are responsible enough to use them properly without exposing EFILive to undue legal risk.

Regards
Paul

[catman3126]

So what will these pro tuning features be?

[Blacky]

So what will these pro tuning features be?

To obtain a Pro Tuning license will require that the applicant can demonstrate a level of skill required to be considered a professional tuner. How EFILive can determine that accurately is not yet defined. It's a "legal issue" regarding supplying product to the public v's supplying product to appropriately skilled personnel.

Evidently the argument that "Anyone can by a set of tools that can be used to disable/damage almost any part of a vehicle and yet if/when the disabled vehicle crashes injuring the occupants, the tool maker is not responsible", doesn't stand up legally. Legally it may be possible to argue that EFILive (with the training wheels removed) cannot be sold to the general public and can only be sold to tuners who have passed some arbitrary level of training. What that training could/would be is anyone's guess.

Anyway, the first two features are:

Less restrictive *.cax files, i.e. allowing calibrations to be defined that overlap (or replace) existing EFILive defined calibrations.
Ability to bypass the "incompatible operating systems" checks when flashing incompatible operating system files into various controllers.


Mostly it will be used to allow the Pro Tuning license holder to bypass restrictions* that if/when used incorrectly will brick the target controller and render it useless and usually unrecoverable.

* Restrictions (i.e. training wheels) that we have to include in our software to prevent customers accidentally or naively shooting themselves in the foot.

Regards
Paul

[catman3126]

Makes sense, when this pro tuning license is implemented will the general tuning public have less access to parameters then they do now?

[Blacky]

Makes sense, when this pro tuning license is implemented will the general tuning public have less access to parameters then they do now?

No, the Pro Tuning License is only intended to bypass existing restrictions. It is actually already implemented in this latest pre-release, it is just that we can't start selling the Pro Tuning licenses until we cross all the legal t's and dot all the legal i's.

We don't plan on removing any existing features from the standard version just to move those features into the Pro Tuning version. You may be thinking of our previous license types: Personal, Commercial and Workshop that each offered a different set of features. That's not where we are heading.

The spirit of the Pro Tuning license is simply to allow tuners to bypass existing restrictions but at the same time for those tuners to assume the risk/responsibility for choosing to do so. We are not implementing the Pro Tuning option as a way to lock existing users out of existing features. It may be conceivable in the future that if some feature in our software becomes a problem and it is causing too many controllers to fail then we may consider moving access to that feature into the Pro tuning license version. However, I can't think of any existing feature that would fall into that category.

Having said that we may in future add additional license types (custom licenses) specifically to allow us to recoup development costs for features that we would otherwise not spend development resources on. Say a group of tuners or even a single large supplier wanted exclusive access to a specific feature (that is not already available) and was willing to pay for it to be developed. EFILive could issue a custom license to activate that feature for that supplier's or group of tuner's exclusive use.

Regards
Paul

[Mitco39]

Having said that we may in future add additional license types (custom licenses) specifically to allow us to recoup development costs for features that we would otherwise not spend development resources on. Say a group of tuners or even a single large supplier wanted exclusive access to a specific feature (that is not already available) and was willing to pay for it to be developed. EFILive could issue a custom license to activate that feature for that supplier's or group of tuner's exclusive use.


Paul,

I strongly disagree with the last paragraph of your post. Doing this will hurt all your customers who do not have the means to pay extra for exclusive service. You guys have many many smaller guys who can compete with larger companies based just on the merit of having good tunes and strong customer service. If you do develop something like this these shops will now lose customers to bigger ones because they cannot compete. EFI Live has in the past been about working on an even playing field and that appears to be changing as time goes on to favor larger shops instead of both the individual and the smaller shops who tune out of passion, not out of the ability to get the most sales.

Talk to any one of your well known but lets say "have not" dealers. Ive spoken with many of them and we are all very much the same, we tune because we love it. We do what we can with the personal we can to provide the best service possible. To offer exclusive use to one faction of your reseller group over another will cause much unrest. I know that because you guys are unique in the world in the service that you offer that you could very well do this without any repercussions so all I am asking is for you to reconsider that direction of development.

If you wanted to do it such that any developed product in house was sold to the general public then thats one thing, but to offer it only to a single tuner or small group of tuners would make things very difficult for a large percentage of your clients. I come from the diesel side of things, and I know your gas market is also very very large so I guess they might have a difference of opinion on this.

I would much rather see further development in new controllers IE. Ford. Just like business has been with your development into the cummins world has been.


Again this is one resellers opinion, and whatever way you guys choose to do it we all will have to live with.


Thanks for your time,

Mitch Cooper

[catman3126]

I can just imagine what is going to happen with this. It's something Efi live has wanted for a long time.

[Highlander]

Paul,

I strongly disagree with the last paragraph of your post. Doing this will hurt all your customers who do not have the means to pay extra for exclusive service. You guys have many many smaller guys who can compete with larger companies based just on the merit of having good tunes and strong customer service. If you do develop something like this these shops will now lose customers to bigger ones because they cannot compete. EFI Live has in the past been about working on an even playing field and that appears to be changing as time goes on to favor larger shops instead of both the individual and the smaller shops who tune out of passion, not out of the ability to get the most sales.

Talk to any one of your well known but lets say "have not" dealers. Ive spoken with many of them and we are all very much the same, we tune because we love it. We do what we can with the personal we can to provide the best service possible. To offer exclusive use to one faction of your reseller group over another will cause much unrest. I know that because you guys are unique in the world in the service that you offer that you could very well do this without any repercussions so all I am asking is for you to reconsider that direction of development.

If you wanted to do it such that any developed product in house was sold to the general public then thats one thing, but to offer it only to a single tuner or small group of tuners would make things very difficult for a large percentage of your clients. I come from the diesel side of things, and I know your gas market is also very very large so I guess they might have a difference of opinion on this.

I would much rather see further development in new controllers IE. Ford. Just like business has been with your development into the cummins world has been.


Again this is one resellers opinion, and whatever way you guys choose to do it we all will have to live with.


Thanks for your time,

Mitch Cooper
THIS IS PERFECT

What paul wants to do is... lets say i want something done with the software for my liking, he will be able to do it.. CHARGE ME for it but only me can have it. That is GREAT stuff. Specially if i say... i want this custom OS done..... It could be in the thousands in RD but I can have that and it will be beneficial for what i want to do.

They are NOT removing anything, they are just doing a for hire programming custom stuff, be it on the software side or wherever.



Thanks

[Taz]

x 2 ... it is an example of the "free market" economic model that is one of the cornerstones of most democratic nations ... simply a sound business offering

GM does the same - equip your new vehicle with any options you want - and the final sale price will be adjusted accordingly ...

[Blacky]

Paul,

I strongly disagree with the last paragraph of your post. Doing this will hurt all your customers who do not have the means to pay extra for exclusive service. You guys have many many smaller guys who can compete with larger companies based just on the merit of having good tunes and strong customer service. If you do develop something like this these shops will now lose customers to bigger ones because they cannot compete. EFI Live has in the past been about working on an even playing field and that appears to be changing as time goes on to favor larger shops instead of both the individual and the smaller shops who tune out of passion, not out of the ability to get the most sales.

Talk to any one of your well known but lets say "have not" dealers. Ive spoken with many of them and we are all very much the same, we tune because we love it. We do what we can with the personal we can to provide the best service possible. To offer exclusive use to one faction of your reseller group over another will cause much unrest. I know that because you guys are unique in the world in the service that you offer that you could very well do this without any repercussions so all I am asking is for you to reconsider that direction of development.

If you wanted to do it such that any developed product in house was sold to the general public then thats one thing, but to offer it only to a single tuner or small group of tuners would make things very difficult for a large percentage of your clients. I come from the diesel side of things, and I know your gas market is also very very large so I guess they might have a difference of opinion on this.

I would much rather see further development in new controllers IE. Ford. Just like business has been with your development into the cummins world has been.


Again this is one resellers opinion, and whatever way you guys choose to do it we all will have to live with.


Thanks for your time,

Mitch Cooper

Hi Mitch,

I think you're reading too much into what I said. Maybe my example that used the term "a group of tuners" was not so great. I should have said a single large customer or a group of tuners working on the same project for some other single large customer.

Think about it like this. If there are features that would be beneficial to more than a single customer, we would not devlop (and never have developed) features exclusivelty for a single customer. We always develop them as part of the publicly released software for everyone to use. It makes our product better it generates far more revenue in sales than a one-off development for a single customer.

The type of features that we could/would do for a single customer would be features that only that customer wants/needs and that would be of zero use to anyone else. For example a company that is making alternative fuel engines, and they need to interface their custom designed electronic module with the existing manufacturer's ECM. They may require some custom commands/messages get sent to their custom module during programming. There's no point clutering up our software with that feature for anyone else to use because its completely useless to anyone else. That's the sort of "user specific" feature I was referring to.

In fact over the years we have turned down many requests by third parties to develop exclusive calibrations and features so that they are not available to the rest of our customer base. We turn down those requests because we won't constrain the useful features in our software to just a few customers. That would end up killing off our product, our revenue stream and then everyone loses - including the company that wanted exclusive access to one or more calibrations. There is no sense for EFILive to do anything like that.

We do not plan to start adding/removing calibrations and/or any other features based on various license levels, I thought I said that in my original post when I said we are not going back to the Personal/Commercial/Workshop style licensing.

Regards
Paul

[Mitco39]

Thanks for clarifying Paul, that makes much more sense.

[cindy@efilive]

EFI Live has in the past been about working on an even playing field and that appears to be changing as time goes on to favor larger shops instead of both the individual and the smaller shops who tune out of passion, not out of the ability to get the most sales.

Talk to any one of your well known but lets say "have not" dealers. Ive spoken with many of them and we are all very much the same, we tune because we love it.
EFILive is an even playing field. Everyone has access to the same software - there is no difference between the version you have and others have. Further, the beta team is made up of a mix of larger and smaller shops as well as personal users - you do know that given you're on the team.

With new platform development, not everything can make a first release. At that point we decide how best to balance those feature against testing requirements, and delivering a quality product that will generate a financial return in a reasonable time frame. When that is communicated customers, testers and users they have a couple of choices - not use the product, use the product, or enhance the product using the framework that exists.

The 'have not' dealers as you put them have the same features as everyone else. The import features and .cax features are becoming more widely used in the diesel market, but they are features that has been in the software for years, primarily used for GM Gas in the past. Just look at all of the flash only supported vehicles on our website. Some of those flash only supported controllers are about to turn 10 years old.

EFILive cannot be responsible if you are unable or don't want to use those features. Out of all the people who have posted here, you are more privileged than most given your on the beta team, but apparently that's still not enough.

Cindy

[Blacky]

x 2 ... it is an example of the "free market" economic model that is one of the cornerstones of most democratic nations ... simply a sound business offering

GM does the same - equip your new vehicle with any options you want - and the final sale price will be adjusted accordingly ...

Hi Taz,

Exactly, that's what we do with the tuning options: GM Tuning option, Cummins Tuning option and now the Pro Tuning option. Additional features that adjust the final price of the product depending on which features you choose.

I think some of the other posters' legitimate concerns were that we would start restricting "additional features" so that only a select set of tuners can purchase particular options. Sort of like GM restricting one or more options to "customers who purchase more than 5 vehicles a year from GM". That's arbitrary and capricious and not a very good business plan.

The Pro Tuning license will be more like the restrictions placed on who can enter their vehicle in a strip/track race. The competitors' vehicles must have passed some from of safety inspection and the driver must hold a relevant race license. The criteria that needs to be met in order to race can be obtained by anyone, its just that the criteria has to be met before they can race.

Right now we're just trying to work out what the criteria will be to purchase the Pro Tuning license. Mostly it will be about the tuner assuming responsibility for ECM/TCM failures when using the PRo license.

Regards
Paul

[GMPX]

Specially if i say... i want this custom OS done..... It could be in the thousands in RD but I can have that and it will be beneficial for what i want to do.
Ah no that is not the case, I can assure you (because I would be the person doing it), there will be no custom one off OS mods, if we start doing that then EFILive becomes something as messy as Linux distributions where there is 100's of little tweaked versions from the core product, completely unmanageable for a company of our size. We learned our lesson on this very early in the LS1 days for one tuner out here and vowed never to fall in to the same trap.

[Duramax 6.6L]

The Pro Tuning license will be more like the restrictions placed on who can enter their vehicle in a strip/track race. The competitors' vehicles must have passed some from of safety inspection and the driver must hold a relevant race license. The criteria that needs to be met in order to race can be obtained by anyone, its just that the criteria has to be met before they can race.

Right now we're just trying to work out what the criteria will be to purchase the Pro Tuning license. Mostly it will be about the tuner assuming responsibility for ECM/TCM failures when using the PRo license.

Regards
Paul

Couldn't this be done with a legal document that the purchaser signs and the document states that he assumes full responsibility for the use of the software and that EFI Live and the affiliates and family can not be held liable for any damage or damages resulting from the use of the Pro Tuning License.

[Mitco39]

Out of all the people who have posted here, you are more privileged than most given your on the beta team, but apparently that's still not enough.

Cindy


Dont get me wrong, I am appreciative of that fact, and I have been trying to help Ross anyway I can because of it I am on that forum pretty much every day. There is some unrest with me as you are well aware and In this case it wasn't the best way to express that given my wrong interpretation of what Paul said.

I took what Paul said the wrong way and he clarified it for me.



Thanks for your time.

[Blacky]

Couldn't this be done with a legal document that the purchaser signs and the document states that he assumes full responsibility for the use of the software and that EFI Live and the affiliates and family can not be held liable for any damage or damages resulting from the use of the Pro Tuning License.

You'd think that would be the case, right? As I said I think the lawyers over-reacted*, now we're just working through the fine details. I expect it will end up being exactly like you just described.


* In reality, the lawyers are just doing their job and making sure everything is watertight, its just an excruciatingly long and intensely tedious process. Something about a customers can't sign away their rights no matter how much they want to. Products must be fit for purpose, products cannot have known failure modes without proper warning. If the failure modes require advanced skill to mitigate then the product can't be sold to the general public etc. Writing software is difficult, dealing with legal issues like this makes programming a joy.

Regards
Paul

[Duramax 6.6L]

You'd think that would be the case, right? As I said I think the lawyers over-reacted*, now we're just working through the fine details. I expect it will end up being exactly like you just described.


* In reality, the lawyers are just doing their job and making sure everything is watertight, its just an excruciatingly long and intensely tedious process. Something about a customers can't sign away their rights no matter how much they want to. Products must be fit for purpose, products cannot have known failure modes without proper warning. If the failure modes require advanced skill to mitigate then the product can't be sold to the general public etc. Writing software is difficult, dealing with legal issues like this makes programming a joy.

Regards
Paul

I agree with you, Dealing with the general public is a hardship that every business must deal with. No matter what you tell them, most of the time they only hear what they want to hear.

[GMC-2002-Dmax]

I know in certain circumstances you do give up your right to sue, go to an amusement park, or a ski slope, you get hurt and you can't sue under those instances.

There is an old saying, " You cannot fix stupid"...........and lawyers try to fix it by filing lawsuits.

[Dmaxink]

I would be ecstatic for a pro tuning license given what was just described it is.

There are a few features in the future that would be amazing, but we can discuss those at a later date!

I'm very thankful for the opportunities efi brings to the table. It truly is a equal software. When I first started in efi, I didn't know anything... Fortunately with many years at 7 days a week and 15+ hour days I have now the knowledge to use many of the features efi provides that when I first started had no clue even existed. I started with no money, only drive and the desire to learn.

Thanks again efi for keeping the ball rolling. I look forward to continued business for many years!