Pro Tuning license

[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.