I'm afraid there is a lot of misunderstanding about what is and isn't free libre open source software (floss). For the benefit of forum members unfamiliar with the terms and as someone that has run floss as my only computer operating system since about 2005, I have some knowledge of what is a very a complex subject. In floss there are two main camps. "free software" championed buy GNU and "Open source" championed by the OSI . The main difference is philosophy and style of licence but there is a huge amount of overlap. Those things apart the simplest method to define floss is the four freedoms.
Free software means the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.
Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.
More precisely, free software means users of a program have the four essential freedoms
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. freedom 0.
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs. freedom 1. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. freedom 2.
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. freedom 3. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
If there is no licence the software is non-free proprietary software. If any of the above freedoms is missing it's non-free proprietary software. For example if one reads the licence of Mega squirt it states "It is a commercial product" i.e. it is NOT "open source"". The technical term for such software is "freeware". It's free to use but doe not have the four freedoms listed above, free as in beer so to speak. This only goes to show their own misunderstanding of floss. There is nothing in the four freedoms that prohibit using it as a commercial product. In fact it's encouraged.
I have to say I find the idea of being able to create and run our own ECU maps very appealing. With the huge number of UCE units coming out of India you would think it could be crowd funded. I see a massive market for the hardware.
kelsoo