You would be hard pressed to find one of us who are well known and do a large volume of emailed or bench flashed tunes not locking it down.
I lock every tune or ecm I sell, and 7 years later business is booming and I don't see myself going out of business anytime soon because I lock them. With LB7 and LLY autolocking the customer can unlock the ecm at any time with a stock file and my work is now protected from prying eyes or dabblers who want to mess up a perfectly good working tune.
People will steal them, that is a undeniable fact, there is and has always a large population of wanna be tuners who will use someone else's proven tune and try to profit from it. You have the customer who buys a tune and then shares it with his buddies thinking it's OK, well the author of that tune sold it once, if the person who bought it didn't share it then it would not be a problem.
What if the truck goes to a shop and a tech reads the tune out without anyone knowing ??? Is that theft or just "OK" in your book ???
Please don't take this as an insult, but gasser tuing is not anywhere close to diesel tuning, there are many variables that need to be addressed just for the Allison to shift properly, so since shift quality is such an important part of the tuning as well as the ability to effectively light a large single or a big set of twins many of us lock our work down to protect our 100's of hours of work.
I tuned my sons 6.0 Denali and it was not too hard to remove some of the TQ management and bump the timing a bit, hardly what I had to go through to tune a diesel.
But if you want to leave your work unlocked it's a free country, feel free to feed the wanna-be tuners your hard work or lose out on future sales because you don't want to take any precautions.
Good Luck to you,
BTW I need a tuner for a 2010 Chevy E78, how much for one.....???