It is and it isn’t. To use the onboard control to actuate the parking brake, yes, you have to use the paywalled software. But it’s a simple motor. Positive and negative. If you disconnect the connector at the parking brake and use fused jumper leads to a 12v battery, you can cause the actuator to go forward or backwards. Make sure the parking brake isn’t applied before doing anything, disconnect the cars battery, disconnect the p brake connector, jump the terminals once you figure out which polarity causes the retraction. Manually compress the caliper piston, replace the pads (and hopefully the rotors too). Pump the brake pedal as you would normally once everything is replaced, reconnect everything, and you’re good to go. in my experience this doesn’t work on ford but there’s a service procedure that doesn’t use a scanner to force the park brake into service mode. There’s always a way around dumb stuff like this