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Comment by VladRussian | Hacker News Reader

was it started by DMCA? I mean the practice of limiting, even outlawing, of analytical thinking.

Ahem... Does the name Galileo mean anything to you? How about Socrates?

there is somewhat fine difference. For example Galileo was allowed to think about how Universe works. The practical law limited what he was allowed to think about Universe.

The DMCA, or like in this article's "engineering" case, outlaws the whole act of thinking. Some areas are just off limit, no matter what you think, Sun rotates around the Earth or Earth around Sun.

It wasn't so much the actual idea of the earth rotating around the sun that Galileo was punished for. It was more the fact that Galileo used analytical thinking to reach that conclusion rather than basing it on some respected Roman or Greek philosopher or the bible. If Galileo had determined that the earth rotated around the sun based on some scripture, there would likely have not been any trial. People might have thought him an idiot or disagreed with him, but they wouldn't have thought him a heretic.

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?

The question is, would we expect authors of libraries to indemnify other developers against liability if the fault is in the library itself?

If it's life critical software, then yes.

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).

Yes. The fact that more than likely it was their PHB who made the decision, not them.

That just shifts the responsibility onto whoever made the decision after being presented with an accurate assessment, PHB or not.

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.

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