People’s freedom jeopardised by new software adopted by California’s courts
Software is currently in a strange place legislatively, in the 18th century Civil Engineering exploded (sometimes literally) and the number of disasters went up in radically (for an interesting case <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge_disaster" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge_disaster</a>), over time professional standards bodies grew alongside the maturing industry to both ensure that people working in the industry where adequately trained <i>and</i> adequately protected from external factors (people pushing them to do things cheaply, skimp on designs etc).<p>Given that we've handed a large part of the running of the modern world over to computers, software and the people who write that software I think at some point we need to start looking at a similar system, now the usual argument to this is "We don't want regulation" or "It's not my code, it's other peoples" but that doesn't alter the reality that this isn't going to get better until the way the industry is run changes, it's not a software issue, better tooling won't save us (it might help though) and there is no perfect outcome.<p>EDIT: It's worth noting that if as an industry we don't work with our customers on this stuff and reach an accord that fits everyone eventually one will be imposed on us from outside, Software Engineering doesn't exist in isolation, other fields of Engineering are covered already.