The licence is GPL so you can make any changes you like, and publish any changes that you've made as long as anything you publish containing parts of this mod is also GPL. You don't need to edit the mod though, just change the startup settings to disable the technology changes.
In order to change the spidertron colour you need to change your player colour instead, and it will be automatically applied to the spidertron. And whilst it lets you change the spidertron name, it actually can't save it so it will be reset to "Spidertron" whenever you get in a vehicle, change surfaces, or upgrade the Spidertron Engineer. This is a limitation of the game API, so please post in support here to get the devs to add it in :)
I'll have a look at Mobile Factory and see if I can improve the integration.