Re: Introduction and possible thread

["Curtis L. Olson" <curt@me.umn.edu>]

Keith Brown writes:
> 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. 
> 
> Anyone have any thoughts on this? Naturally, it'd be great is one of
> was actually a lawyer and wanted to throw in his $.02 worth, on a
> contingency basis, of course :-) 

I've played around a bit with the Jeppesen flight planning/moving map
software.  I managed to spot one hideous bug.  As I was flying toward
my destination airport, the software reported an ever increasing
distance and ETA.  But, it did report the correct heading.  I've only
seen this happen once.  I've also seen it hang/crash on numerous
occasions.  This is with win95 so neither problem may directly be the
fault of Jeppeson ... who knows.

I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have my pilots license (the above
experience was with a simulator) so I can't answer your liability
questions.  But that doesn't stop me from making wild
speculations. :-)

I would guess that 99.999% of pilots would have enough sense not to
trust their lives completely in a win95 based product ... or for that
matter depend on any one single point of failure.

I would also guess that most people having run MS operating systems
and software are used to frequent bugs and crashes and have the
appropriate distrust of any software and the common sense to cross
check with all the other information available.

I think that having all the appropriate disclaimers clearly posted
would definitely be required and helpful for disuading people from
naming you in a lawsuit.

Taking a step back it seems really silly that a person would have to
hesitate to contribute something useful to society because of the
threat of being sued by someone who foolishly mis-used it.  But I
guess that is life, at least here in the USA ...

Maybe what you need to do is get a fake hotmail address and do all
your development with an anonymous identity that can't be traced back
to your real identity. :-)

Curt.
-- 
Curtis Olson                        University of MN, ME Dept.
curt@me.umn.edu                     
http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt      Try Linux!
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