I can't help but think so much of this could be solved if we simply had real and effective product liability rules and consequences for things that use software.
You give it away for free, no guarantees and such? Great, we appreciate it.
You sold something to someone? Okay, well, like with food and buildings and cars and airplane rides, we understand that if it's done wrong it can be really harmful, so we have real legal consequences for getting it wrong. Where you sourced your inputs is not my problem when it does -- whether that input was "free software" or "rotten ingredients" or "faulty concrete."
Software is everywhere. A 5 USD gadget dies because the software is shit? Nobody cares. (The ewaste is bad still.) An 1 USD app has bugs? Meh.
We have liability regulations for the actual things that use software. (And in some cases too much and in some cases too little. See healthcare, medical devices, FDA on one end, and Boeing and the MCAS fuckup on the other end.)
One reason Amazon got sooo big is that they do have a consumer protection regulation. (The return everything no questions asked policy. Of course they also have a fucking big problem with scams, and they are too hostile with merchants, because they are a fucking de facto monopoly, and are not forced to work much on those problems or "metrics".)
> if we simply had real and effective product liability rules...
Isn't there a risk it software would become as ineffective as healthcare?
It seems to me that private enterprises aren't good at handling huge uncertainties (like liability). So businesses would aggressively minimize liabilities. Sure we would get better software, but we might get less competition, higher barriers to entry, more expensive products, and less capable products.
Suing companies for doing the wrong thing is an expensive mechanism. Gradually regulating supply-chain documentation is probably cheaper.
I literally believe we would likely get the opposite of every possible negative thing you mentioned; mostly because I think the cause of most software problems (or more specifically, the difficulty of discovering and fixing them) comes directly from the monopoly and monopoly-like players that currently exist.
I'm aware that a world in which e.g. Microsoft was actually sued to the extent of the damage it has caused is hard to envision, but I can't help but think breaking that sort of thing up by whatever means gets you more visibility, more localism, more shallow bugs, etc.
You give it away for free, no guarantees and such? Great, we appreciate it.
You sold something to someone? Okay, well, like with food and buildings and cars and airplane rides, we understand that if it's done wrong it can be really harmful, so we have real legal consequences for getting it wrong. Where you sourced your inputs is not my problem when it does -- whether that input was "free software" or "rotten ingredients" or "faulty concrete."