>> That's fine, it just means that devs without stamps can't sign off on anything actually important
For some definition of important.
But let's follow your thought through. Who decides what is important? You? Me? The developer? Yhe end-user? Some regulatory body?
Is Tetris important? OpenSSL? Notepad ++? My side project on github?
If my OSS project becomes important, and I now need to find one of your expensive engineers to sign off on it, take liability for it, do you think I can afford her? How could they be remotely sure that the code is OK? How would they begin to determine if its safe or not?
>> Software did in-fact eat the world. Why shouldn't it have any legal/professional liability like civil and structural engineering?
Because those professions have shown us why that model doesn't scale. How many bridges, dams etc are built by engineers every year? How does that compare to the millions of software projects started every year?
In the last 30 years we've pretty much written all the code, on all the platforms, in use today. Linux, Windows, the web, phones, it's all less than 35 years old. What civil engineering projects have been completed in the same time scale? A handful of new skyscrapers?
You are basically suggesting we throw away all software ever written and rebuild the world based on individual's prepared to take on responsibility and legal liability for any bugs they create along the way?
I would suggest that not only would this be impossible, not only would it be meaningless, but it would take centuries to get to where we are right now. With just as many bugs as there are now. But, yay, we can bankrupt an engineer every time a bug is exploited.
This has all been done before in mechanical, structural, and civil engineering. People die and then regulatory and industry standards fix the problems.
We do not need to re-invent the concepts of train engine, bridge, and dam standards again.
I mean, I guess we actually do. The issue is that software has not yet killed enough people for those lessons to be learned. We are now at that cliff's edge [0], [1].
Another problem might be that software influence is on a far more hockey-stick-ish growth curve than what we dealt with in mechanical, civil, and structural engineering.
Meanwhile, our tolerance for professional and governmental standards seems to be diminishing.
No, the world's infrastructure has never been rebuilt from scratch to higher standards, not in the last few thousand years. We have always built on what already exists, grandfathered in anything that seemed ok, or was important enough even if not ok, etc.
We often live in buildings that far predate any building code, or even the state that emitted that code. We still use bits of infrastructure here and there that are much older than any modern state at all (though, to be fair, if a bridge has been around for the last thousand years, the risk it goes down tomorrow because it doesn't respect certain best practices is not exactly huge).
For some definition of important.
But let's follow your thought through. Who decides what is important? You? Me? The developer? Yhe end-user? Some regulatory body?
Is Tetris important? OpenSSL? Notepad ++? My side project on github?
If my OSS project becomes important, and I now need to find one of your expensive engineers to sign off on it, take liability for it, do you think I can afford her? How could they be remotely sure that the code is OK? How would they begin to determine if its safe or not?
>> Software did in-fact eat the world. Why shouldn't it have any legal/professional liability like civil and structural engineering?
Because those professions have shown us why that model doesn't scale. How many bridges, dams etc are built by engineers every year? How does that compare to the millions of software projects started every year?
In the last 30 years we've pretty much written all the code, on all the platforms, in use today. Linux, Windows, the web, phones, it's all less than 35 years old. What civil engineering projects have been completed in the same time scale? A handful of new skyscrapers?
You are basically suggesting we throw away all software ever written and rebuild the world based on individual's prepared to take on responsibility and legal liability for any bugs they create along the way?
I would suggest that not only would this be impossible, not only would it be meaningless, but it would take centuries to get to where we are right now. With just as many bugs as there are now. But, yay, we can bankrupt an engineer every time a bug is exploited.