Introduction and possible thread

So far, I've seen introductions from Don and Jerry. I'm from the other side of the fence, having more experience in aviation then computers or specifically Linux, at least professionally. I've been involved in flying one way or another since I was about 10 years old. I spent 9-1/2 years in the U.S. Air Force, 6-1/2 as enlisted aircrew on C-130 aircraft (2000 hrs) and 3 as an air traffic controller. I've been a controller now with the FAA at Houston Center since 1991. I hold a BA in Professional Aeronautics from Embry-Riddle and an AAS in Airway Sciences from The Community College of the Air Force. I am a private pilot, but I haven't been current for a number of years since raising a family has kinda put that on the back burner for a while.

I've been programming in C/C++ as a hobby for about 10 years. I don't have anything concrete to show for it except maybe a small part of the KDE project. I wrote the original tree widget that was used in KFM and some other apps. I've been using Linux since Slackware 1.something. If you notice I'm writing this from Windows, its because I lost the hard drive that was my /home partition in Linux (GRRRR!). I'm not very happy with Quantum right now. Anyway, I normally use Linux for almost everything.

One thing I've always been interested in working on is flight planning software. At one time, I worked out a lot of the algorithms and interface design for such a project. I noticed both Don and Jerry expressed similar interests. The thing that stopped me though was exposure to liability. I never discussed it with an attourney or other legal authority, it was just my concern for my financial welfare.

As you all probably know, General Aviation was almost put out of business because of product liability. I'm surprised there hasn't been a problem with flight planning software. Either the industry has been lucky, the products have been good enough to have never been perceived as contributory to an accident, or maybe I'm wrong about the potential for trouble. Of course, the scenario I envision is a bug in the software or Joe Blow's incompetence in using it along with his incompetence at flying causes "controlled flight into terrain" or something of that nature. At least those few companies that control the market probably have enough resources to try to defend themselves. I (we) don't, and no matter how many disclaimers you present on your product, it doesn't prevent someone from naming you in a lawsuit and forcing you to pay big bucks to defend it in court. I don't really know what impact the concept of freeware or open source would have on this. Perversely, it seems to me that the more a product does for the pilot to keep him out of trouble, the more exposed the creators are to lawsuits. I mean, if you claim the ability to determine conflicts with minimum altitudes, special use airspace, weather conditions, etc., that's just more ammunition to be used against you when a pilot relies on it, perhaps mistakenly, and it gets him dead.