> But if governments do nothing, then let us, as an industry, take the chance to do something to avoid another disaster that would give governments the political will to enslave our software, and our minds, to their wills.

Setting aside for a moment the flagrant hyperbole:

The industry will never do something without government pressure. It's a collective action problem—building reliable software has an enormous cost to it that building unreliable software does not. No company is going to swallow that cost out of the goodness of their hearts, and unless all companies in a sector move at once they can't recoup the cost from the customer.

This is the exact kind of problem that governments exist to solve: without intervention the market is broken and safety will always be sacrificed to undercut on price. Whatever the author feels about regulation, it's inevitable in some form or another. The question isn't whether the industry will get their act together before governments start moving (they most definitely won't), it's whether governments will give the industry a window to self-regulate under direct and explicit threat of intervention or if they'll immediately start writing the regulations themselves.