I'm involved in the design of embedded systems for a relatively consumer market, and I've looked into making my company's designs more accessible to modificatio

I'm involved in the design of embedded systems for a relatively consumer market, and I've looked into making my company's designs more accessible to modification/software manipulation. There are a few (sometimes major) costs to allowing the modification of software that people tend to ignore in this discussion: - Support: If you want to make your product more accessible to repair, you need to provide support for that. This costs developer time (making the code nice enough to be externally visible, maybe putting together an SDK, making sure any actual secret sauce or anti-counterfeiting systems are blocked off), customer support time (you WILL get calls when somebody buys a used system with modified firmware that doesn't work), and increases the hardware costs (want to provide a JTAG port? that's PCB space and BOM cost). - Brand reflection: We've all seen how much of a ripple the wrong person having a bad experience with a product can have on the market. Say somebody buys a modified Initech Widget (tm) that has a bug or burns some other expensive equipment that it has to work with. That person complains on their friendly local social media network that Initech Widgets have a habit of (say) turning off furnaces in the middle of winter so the user's pipes freeze. Suddenly Initech is dealing with a media storm because they allowed modification of their software, which brings us to... - Liability. What happens if somebody modifies the software in my product and somebody dies, burns down their house, or (* forbid) makes it possible to cause harmful interference and the FCC finds out? How do I prove to that user's (or the FCC's) lawyers that I shouldn't have to pay the damages? Let's assume that, as in the case of tractors or mobile baseband modems (which seem to get brought up a lot in this case) that software is a FUNDAMENTAL part of ensuring the safety/compliance of the unit. Every time I've been through that calculus, the answer at the end has been, "I should do everything in my power to prevent the firmware of my devices from being modified". I can understand and sympathize with the arguments in the other direction, and as a consumer I'm both qualified and interested in modifying the software on my widgets, but it would take a lot of change in the way our society works before most companies will put themselves at risk by supporting or even allowing it for their products.