I'm not against the idea, but analogizing to medicine isn't great. There are a number of challenged that need sorting before an oath is feasible:
* Medicine is thousands of years old. Software is decades old. There's still a lot we don't know.
* Medicine involves a lot of repeat situations, do you can set precedent and learn over time. Software isn't always new, but there are more novel applications than in medicine.
* The patient is, generally speaking, at the center of a doctor's ethical universe. It's not clear who the "patient" is for engineers. Users are often malicious. You can just say engineers must consider "society as a whole" but that's kind of a cop out, and not useful for trickier situations.
I don't think that's what the original article is getting at though. It talks about user privacy rights for instance, and it would be harmful to certain companies to not spy on their users, even if it's the right thing to do for society at large.
* Medicine is thousands of years old. Software is decades old. There's still a lot we don't know.
* Medicine involves a lot of repeat situations, do you can set precedent and learn over time. Software isn't always new, but there are more novel applications than in medicine.
* The patient is, generally speaking, at the center of a doctor's ethical universe. It's not clear who the "patient" is for engineers. Users are often malicious. You can just say engineers must consider "society as a whole" but that's kind of a cop out, and not useful for trickier situations.