prohibiting use that would result in death or personal injury

[Brian Behlendorf]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Justin Wells wrote:
> Refresher: what we're talking about is whether or not you can get away 
> with "do not use this software for life-safety systems" in an opensource 
> license (violating fields of endeavour) and if you don't disclaim
> that, are you open to unlimited liability.

Are you sure in your jurisdiction that that applies to transactions
without "consideration"?  E.g., I can buy that for the raft example you
gave, but you're paying the rafting rental place; no one is paying the
open source developer for that code (unless they've hired them to do
so).  I do know that courts look much differently at contracts that are
"without consideration" than those that are.  In fact, keeping this in the
realm of copyright law and *not* contract law may be the clincher - do you
have any evidence of someone writing a book on some subject, then being
sued (successfully) when using the information in that book led to some
unfortunate situation?  I think that's a closer comparison than the
rafting example.

	Brian