Terms of use

1. What Phoenix is

Phoenix is an independent, non-commercial, clean-room reimplementation of a cloud service that was shut down in 2019. It is distributed as source code so that owners of the affected hardware can run a compatible service themselves.

These terms govern your use of the Phoenix software, this website, and the administrative console served alongside it. By downloading, installing, running or using any of them, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use Phoenix.

2. There is no operated service

This is the single most important thing to understand about Phoenix, and most of what follows depends on it.

There is no company behind Phoenix. There is no Phoenix-operated server, no hosted tier, no support desk, no account you hold with anyone, and nothing to purchase or subscribe to. Every running copy of Phoenix belongs to the person who installed it.

If you are using a Phoenix console, you are using someone's own installation — most likely your own. The people who wrote the software have no access to it, no ability to recover your data, no ability to reset your password, and no visibility into whether it is running at all.

3. Your licence to use it

You may use, copy, modify and redistribute the Phoenix source code under the terms of the licence distributed with it. Where these terms and that licence disagree about the software itself, the licence governs.

Phoenix is offered for personal and non-commercial use. It exists so that people who own a particular discontinued robot can keep using the hardware they paid for. Selling access to a Phoenix instance, bundling it into a commercial product, or presenting it as an official or supported service is outside what this project is for and is not permitted under these terms.

4. Acceptable use

When you use Phoenix, or any console served by an instance of it, you agree not to:

• access an instance you have not been authorised to use, or attempt to obtain another person's account, session or robot credentials;
• use it to record, transcribe or monitor people who have not consented to being recorded by the robot in that space;
• use it to store or distribute unlawful material, or material you have no right to;
• present it as an official, endorsed or commercially supported product, or as affiliated with any rights holder in the original hardware or software;
• remove or obscure the notices in section 7 from a copy you redistribute or an instance you make available to others.

A robot with a microphone and a camera sits in somebody's home. Please treat the people around it the way you would want to be treated.

5. If you run an instance

Running Phoenix makes you, and not this project, responsible for it. In particular, you are responsible for:

• the security of the machine, the network it is on and the credentials it holds;
• everything the instance stores, including other household members' personal data, the photographs the robot takes, and the messages it carries;
• obtaining whatever consent is required from the people in range of the robot, and telling them what is being recorded and kept;
• complying with the laws that apply where you live, including any data-protection obligations you may have towards other members of your household;
• your own backups. Nobody else has a copy.

If you let other people use your instance, those people are your users, not this project's. Any obligation you have to them is yours.

6. Third-party services

Phoenix can be configured to reach outside services — for example map tiles, weather, news or traffic providers — because the robot's own features depend on that data. Those services are operated by other people, under their own terms, and this project makes no promise about their availability, accuracy or conduct.

Which of them an instance contacts is a configuration decision made by whoever runs it. The software is built so that each one degrades visibly rather than silently when it cannot be reached.

7. Trademarks and independence

Phoenix is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to Jibo, Inc., its successors, assignees, or any current holder of rights in the Jibo hardware, software or trademarks.

"Jibo" and any related marks belong to their respective owners. They are used here only descriptively — to identify the hardware this software is compatible with — as is necessary to describe what the project does. No claim of ownership is made, and no association is implied.

Phoenix ships no code, binaries, firmware or other proprietary material from the original service. It was written from scratch, using the original only as a behavioural reference. Plain-text data files that the robot already carries on its own hardware are vendored so the reimplementation can interoperate with it.

If you hold rights in the original work and believe something in this project oversteps, please raise it with the maintainer of the instance or repository you are looking at. The intent of this project is preservation and interoperability, not appropriation.

8. No warranty

Phoenix is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement.

Nobody warrants that Phoenix will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, error-free, or compatible with your robot, your firmware version, your network or your future. The project's own documentation states plainly that full behavioural equivalence with the original service is unverified and that parts of the system are incomplete. Please read it before relying on anything here.

9. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, no contributor to Phoenix shall be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, loss of use, loss of goodwill, hardware damage, or service interruption, arising out of or in connection with Phoenix or these terms — whether in contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability or otherwise, and whether or not any contributor has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain liabilities. Where that is the case, the exclusions and limitations above apply to the greatest extent that law permits, and nothing here is intended to exclude liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Because Phoenix is supplied free of charge and no contributor operates a service for you, there is no fee against which any remedy could be measured.

10. Your robot and your hardware

Using Phoenix involves pointing a physical device at a server you control, and may involve installing software onto that device. This carries real risk. A robot may be rendered unusable, may lose its existing configuration, or may fail to return to any previous service.

You accept that risk yourself. The project's documentation records which parts of this path are verified and which are not; the unverified parts are unverified precisely because nobody has yet proven they are safe.

11. Changes

These terms may change as the project does. The version in effect for a given installation is the one distributed with it, and the "last updated" date above marks the most recent revision of this copy. Continuing to use Phoenix after a change means you accept the revised terms.

If these terms are translated or adapted by an operator, the English text distributed with the source is the authoritative one.

If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.

12. Contact

There is no company to write to. For anything concerning a specific running instance — your account, your data, your robot — the right person is the maintainer of the Phoenix instance you are using.

For anything concerning the software itself, the repository it came from is the place to raise it.

See also: Privacy policy and Security.