> The open source software provides no indemnification.
Just as Google and Apple do, QNX contains multiple open source components from other parties that QNX does not own the copyright to including code licensed under APACHE, BSD-2C, BSD-3C, BSD-OPENSSL, BSD-V, ISC-V, GPL2-EX2, MIT, MIT-V, MPL, MPL10, PYTHON, UL, ZLIB (this is copy-pasted from QNX's own open source license compliance documentation). Anyone can sue Ford directly for using those components just as they can with the use of Google or Apple software.
Now, if QNX itself provides a complete indemnification from both copyright and patent lawsuits arising from the use of said code and Apple and Google do not, that's a different story. But unless that is the case, Ford is no safer with QNX.
I'm not a lawyer but sat in many of the internal meetings. From what I understand, anyone who signs up to work with Ford Motor also signs a legal agreement saying you take on legal responsibility for your actions....
As an example, Ford is also a big Linux shop but they do not use any old Linux distro. They have partnered with Novell (SUSE Linux) who indemnifies them from all open source code found in the SUSE distribution.
When I was on Ford SYNC, no Google code ran on the module. The feature they are talking about is called Send To Sync and it's a web service where the SYNC module can receive a map planned on Google Maps. The mapping software in Ford SYNC is simply given the data output in the form of lat/long info.
There is no way that Novell or QNX are big enough to indemnify Ford unless we're talking about some kind of huge business or E&O policy or something; in which case Ford is paying the bill for that.
It doesn't matter that it's open source, it matters that you're buying it from someone who is assuming the liability if it's bad. Bad when I worked for the government we bought a lot of Red Hat enterprise licenses not because we wanted the support (it was for a classified machine) but simply because we weren't allowed to use "freeware".
Just as Google and Apple do, QNX contains multiple open source components from other parties that QNX does not own the copyright to including code licensed under APACHE, BSD-2C, BSD-3C, BSD-OPENSSL, BSD-V, ISC-V, GPL2-EX2, MIT, MIT-V, MPL, MPL10, PYTHON, UL, ZLIB (this is copy-pasted from QNX's own open source license compliance documentation). Anyone can sue Ford directly for using those components just as they can with the use of Google or Apple software.
Now, if QNX itself provides a complete indemnification from both copyright and patent lawsuits arising from the use of said code and Apple and Google do not, that's a different story. But unless that is the case, Ford is no safer with QNX.