> I want software provider to be liable for the damage they cause and minimum quality regulation on par with an actual engineering discipline. I have always been astounded that nearly all software licences start with extremely broad limitation of liability provisions and people somehow feel fine with it. Try to extend that to any other product you regularly use in your life and see how that makes you fell.
So do you want to make it illegal to punish GNU GPL licensed software because that license has a warranty disclaimer? Do you want to make it illegal for a company like Cloudflare to use open source licensed software with similar warranty disclaimers, or for the SLA agreements and penalties for violating them that they make with their own paying customers to be legally unenforceable? What if I just have a personal website and I break the javascript on it because I was careless, how should that be legally treated?
I'm not against research into more reliable software or using better engineering techniques that result in more reliable software. What I'm concerned about is the regulatory regime - in other words, what software it is or is not legal to write or sell for money - and how to properly incentivize software service providers to use techniques that result in more reliable software without causing a bunch of bad second order effects.
You can't go out in the middle of your city, build a shoddy bridge, say you wave all responsibilities and then wash your hands with the consequences when it predictably breaks. Why can you do that with pieces of software?
Limiting the scope of liability waivers is not the same things as censoring what software can be produced. It's just ensuring that everyone actually take responsibility for the things they distribute.
As I said previously, the current situation doesn't make sense to me. People have been brainwashed in believing that the way software is released currently, half finished and crippled with bugs, is somehow normal and acceptable. It absolutely doesn't have to be this way.
It'a beyond shameful that the average developers today is blissfully unaware of anything related to producing actually secure pieces of software. I am pretty sure I can walk into more than 90% of development shops today and no one there will know what formal methods are. With some luck, they might have some static analysers running, probably from a random provider and be happy with the crappy percentages that it outputs.
It's not about research. It's about a field which entirely refuses to become mature despite being pivotal to the modern economy. And why would it? Software products somehow get a free pass for the shit they push on everyone.
We are in the classical "market for lemons" trap where negative externalities are not priced in and investing in security will just get you to lose against companies that don't care. Every major incidents remind us we need out. The market has already showed it won't self correct. It's a classical case where regulatory intervention is necessary and legitimate.
The shift is already happening by the way. The EU product liability directive was adopted in 2024 and the transition period ends in December 2026. The US "National Cybersecurity Strategy" signals intend to review the status quo. It's coming faster that people realise.
So do you want to make it illegal to punish GNU GPL licensed software because that license has a warranty disclaimer? Do you want to make it illegal for a company like Cloudflare to use open source licensed software with similar warranty disclaimers, or for the SLA agreements and penalties for violating them that they make with their own paying customers to be legally unenforceable? What if I just have a personal website and I break the javascript on it because I was careless, how should that be legally treated?
I'm not against research into more reliable software or using better engineering techniques that result in more reliable software. What I'm concerned about is the regulatory regime - in other words, what software it is or is not legal to write or sell for money - and how to properly incentivize software service providers to use techniques that result in more reliable software without causing a bunch of bad second order effects.