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Comment by johndhi | Hacker News Reader

What she is asking for is a radical economic restructuring of a free market.

It's attitudes like hers that lead to the federal government having the worst software imaginable. It just doesn't work unless everyone agrees to do it .. so good luck

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Liability for a defective product is a “radical restructuring”? It’s something we have in almost every other category of business - not perfectly but pervasive enough that software is really conspicuous as an outlier.

Absolutely. OEM car parts suppliers have liability not just for their own product but whatever consequences happen downstream, like the cost of recalls, etc. And that makes sense becase liability is on the companies that are in the best position to ensure their product is correct.

Vendors of engineering software used by car makers, on the other hand, have no such liability. It's software so its the user's responsibility.

Now imagine software priced like OEM car parts. We'd all be running some heirloom version of Turbo Pascal.

You know that some of the most profitable companies in the world are software companies, right? Putting more resources into security and robustness wouldn’t mean a copy of Excel costs $5,000, it’d mean that Microsoft’s profit margins go down slightly and they ship new features slightly slower. The incredible leverage of software engineering would still mean that they’re amortizing those costs across a billion users.

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