Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by rwmj on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @04:33PM (#14799834)

These open source driving platforms are an interesting way to test out the limits of liability disclaimers on software. This license has:

   8. Limitation of Liability. In no event and under no legal theory,
      whether in tort (including negligence), contract, or otherwise,
      unless required by applicable law (such as deliberate and grossly
      negligent acts) or agreed to in writing, shall any Contributor be
      liable to You for damages, including any direct, indirect, special,
      incidental, or consequential damages of any character arising as a
      result of this License or out of the use or inability to use the
      Work (including but not limited to damages for loss of goodwill,
      work stoppage, computer failure or malfunction, or any and all
      other commercial damages or losses), even if such Contributor
      has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

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Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by stupidcar on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @06:11PM (#14800455)

I notice the website contains a separate disclaimer that begins:

"The Apollo Open Platform (“Platform”) data, software and code provided or developed on the Platform (collectively, “Platform Code”), may be licensed to you strictly for testing purposes."

http://apollo.auto/docs/disclaimer.html

IANAL, but is it permissible to say that Apache licensed code is only licensed for the purposes of "testing"? Wouldn't that conflict with clause 2 of the Apache license?

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Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by boomboomsubban on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @09:45PM (#14801550)

The Apollo Open Platform seems to be something separate not licensed under the Apache License. It appears to be the actual data used to design a robot, and the Apollo software is just the UI.

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Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by usaphp on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @08:43PM (#14801263)

Otherwise nobody would want to work on open source projects if they were to be always liable for the damage their software causes its users...

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Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by nsxwolf on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @05:20PM (#14800169)

Count me out on ever contributing to a project like this. I really don't want to be a test case.

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Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by mwfunk on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @12:06AM (#14801946)

This isn't because it's unreliable or because you (the developer) would be a test case. I mean, I don't know anything about this project so I can't vouch for it, but pretty much every open source project in this area is obligated to have this kind of verbiage and it has nothing to do with the quality of the project.

This is so you can contribute to an open source project without worrying about some random person suing you. This is to protect the contributors, which includes anyone who submits changes, which would include you. If you see an autonomous driving project that doesn't have language like this, that's the project you want to stay away from, not this one.

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Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by nsxwolf on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @02:33PM (#14806674)

Maybe I wasn't clear. I don't want to be a test case for the disclaimer.

Just because you write it down doesn't make it so. Even if a lawyer wrote it.

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Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by mwfunk on Thursday July 20, 2017 @12:46AM (#14810056)

But if there's no disclaimer at all, then someone can sue you, even if the whole case is BS and the software you contributed to wasn't at fault. It's still something you'd have to deal with. Never contribute to something that doesn't have this sort of disclaimer- it means both that you would be leaving yourself open to lawsuits (justified or not), and that the people running the project don't know what they're doing.

If an open source project in this area doesn't have a disclaimer like this, the people running that project are clueless, and if they're clueless about that, they're almost certainly clueless about the much more complicated technical stuff, so it wouldn't be a project which would be desirable to contribute to in the first place.

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Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by yzmtf2008 on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @06:12PM (#14800463)

Most open source projects have a disclaimer like this. You don't want to be responsible for the usage of whichever random programmer either.

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Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by weberc2 on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @06:29PM (#14800554)

I hope there is a difference in liability between a self-driving car library and it's left-pad dependency.

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Re:Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform by jhall1468 on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @10:16PM (#14801668)

There isn't when your the one using the software on your hardware.

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