[1ntCobra]

I can see two reasons for the way the manufacturers are pursuing this copyright issue, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

1) Let's say a company in China decides to make a knock off of an F150. It would be easy to make copies of the F150 computer code. Certainly easier than trying to engineer the software from scratch. A company like Ford has probably spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars developing the software for their cars. The Chinese knock off companies should find some source of computer and software that they license from another manufacturer instead of just making copies of the code.

2) As twobjshelbys points out the software is much more sophisticated these days. I am sure the simple computers in cars of 20 or 30 years ago were probably 8 bit machines with several thousand machine instructions. The code was probably written in assembly, so, it probably was straightforward code. Someone trying to modify it with a new set of code could probably figure out what all of the code in the computer was doing in a week or so. These days with cheap hardware, multi-core chips and cheap RAM, the car manufacturers certainly have the ability to have millions of lines of source code and it is probably multi-threaded code doing many things at once. Do you really suppose it will be simple to go into the machine code and modify it? And I am sure the manufacturer's have all kinds of automated test software and equipment to properly test any code changes that they make. Someone tweaking optimized machine code in a new computer may find that finding what they want to change to be like finding a needle in a haystack. Not only don't they have the benefit of the source code, they do not have the benefit of all of the testing software and equipment to make sure that what they did, did not screw things up in a way that they don't understand. They may unknowingly be modifying a library function that impacts much more than they think it does. And what about Toyota? I wonder how many millions of dollars they spent trying to prove that their engine management software was not causing unintended acceleration. I think the US government brought in NASA to help Toyota do the analysis. Do you think Toyota would be happy if you tweaked their software and risk you might accelerate out of control or not be able to stop? I think modifying their code would let them off the hook for not only warranty, but whatever else you might consider suing them for. The US government thought that the dozens or hundreds of professional software developer who worked on Toyota's software could not necessarily be trusted to get it right and you want to hack that software yourself?