For those not familiar, flashprotuning.com is (was) a site and a forum that hosted a decent amount of free Hondata calibrations. It also had a bunch of really helpful tuning information and tutorials. It was an incredibly useful resource for someone like me. It was also home to probably the most popular base tune for the 8th Generation Civic, Mucter's Stock Tune.

Anyways, the site is currently down. If you try to go directly to flashprotuning.com is just displays a line of text saying "No Free Tunes For You".

There have been a few threads made at the 8thcivic forum (where I've been a member for years) and they've been locked by mods, usually with a comment suggesting going to Vitviper to buy a tune. I'm not really getting much info over at the 8thcivic forum so I figured I'd post here to see if anyone else had some insight.

 

Hondata probably threatened a lawsuit and in turn they shut it down!

 

It is always nice to put time, effort and money into something, then have someone else reverse engineer it for free and then give it away for far less than it cost to develop.

 

Say I tuned a Hondata ECU. Is that bin/cal file property of Hondata? not familiar with there product copywrite, never used it! Always used open source tuning hardware and software.

I am not familiar with the site in question ether. I am only assuming that it was a place for people to share files and tips and tricks on how to tune using a Hondata EMS. Not sure how anything was reverse engineered, unless like on PGM.FI, some portion of Hondata's code was published for hacking purposes. In that case, they get shut down and they deserve it! Not like the Hondata vs PGM-FI lawsuit was completely unknown to the Honda tuning community.

 

hondata is pretty aggressive in keeping a monopoly and will sue anyone and their mother to keep it that way it seems like
probably a patent hog also to be able to sue other smaller companies that created similar product. you cant seriously expect only a single company to come up with an aftermarket product.

theres always more than one inventor for every invention, the quicker and more aggressive one usually gets to stay in the spotlight, and the smaller guy gets kicked to the curb.

 

v4lu3s it is nice. because the only person winning from a monopoly on something is the person getting paid from overpriced product he is selling. regardless of how much it cost to develop...
a 600% markup is not a great thing for customers

when it costs 5 dollars to make a product and its sold for 500 dollars you might think differently when you on the customer's side of the counter.

imagine hondata completely shut down crome. I own 4 Hondas and would have to fork out close to 2000 dollars to have RTP on each Honda or over a 1000 dollars to even have a chip tune on each of them.
crome allows me to do that for very minimal cost. yes of course hondata don't like that because they don't make a dollar on it. my opinion? they can burn in hell if they think they can control this market by suing everyone all the time and for that reason alone I don't own any hondata products

 

you're looking at it wrong. patents and copyrights only apply to their hardware and software. not WHAT they do, but the exact details of each. its not a monopoly, there are tons of other systems out there, and hondata will never touch them unless they directly copy something, which the good ones will never do. the chinese company that recently did it though, thats a different story, because they literally made near-exact copies of s300 units.

 

lol I saw that
damn good job too. Chinese will copy anything.

Russians made its own version with components from 1980s saw that one as well. kinda cool
but you cant disagree that hondata is very aggressive towards other competitors

 

Why it assumed that Hondata has anything to do with this at all?

 

From what I understand, Hondata has nothing to do with this. From what I can gather, A user named VitViper was the owner of the site and he decided to shut it down. I'm not sure of his presence in this forum, but he is a very popular Hondata tuner on the 8thcivic forum. He also sells his tuning services vittuned.com. I assume he's done giving away his services for free or something. The only frustrating part is that all of the threads discussing this topic on the 8thcivic forum are being locked by the mods, which is lame.

 

well if they are being locked by the mods then he didn't just do it on his own free will

 

First I had heard of it. Went to get a file and noticed the site was down.

I wouldnt be surprised if it became more trouble than its worth.

Also Spunkster is my hero.

 

Just an update! Flashprotuning.com is back, now charging for formerly free tunes! This post is the second google result when you search for flashprotuning, so I thought I'd use this platform to direct you to an 8thcivic thread where Vitviper shows up and is kind of a dick.

Flashprotuning.com is back! - 8th Generation Honda Civic Forum