I think software industry is slowly headed this way: that there will come a point when you cannot let a member of the public use something based on your code without you being a licensed SE.
I think the uncertainties inherent in writing software that depends on many other complex libraries/frameworks will tend to discourage strong liability for bugs. The average Win32 program or Java web app has a dizzying list of dependencies and it would be impossible for the programmer sitting on top of that software stack to make any guarantees about the stuff underneath.
In certain highly restricted domains (typically embedded systems), liability for bugs becomes somewhat more realistic.
The average Win32 program or Java web app has a dizzying list of dependencies and it would be impossible for the programmer sitting on top of that software stack to make any guarantees about the stuff underneath.
That, divorced from further arguments, is not an extraordinarily strong argument against liability for defects. After all: the engineer who builds upon such a stack has presumably, more or less consciously, made the decision that defects are acceptable - otherwise they would have chosen something less complex. Is there any particular reason someone should not be held accountable for that decision?
You don't get to blame civil engineers for structure failure if the steel provided had material faults (that couldn't be detected by said engineers exercising due diligence).
Microsoft, for one, has been pushing for that for over a decade. I read Steve McConnell's After the Gold Rush: Creating a True Profession of Software Engineering, a few years ago and had read articles in several print magazines, I'm pretty sure Dr Dobb's had several, in the late 1990s.
