[stickfigure]

Bridges and civil structures are permitted, with plans (and fees) filed with government offices. That's how licensing is enforced.

Imagine for a moment, a world in which every git commit requires a permit from the county planner.

Also: You will not get agreement on what the GAAP practices of software are. This industry isn't that mature.

[Verdex]

> Also: You will not get agreement on what the GAAP practices of software are. This industry isn't that mature.

Hear, hear.

This point cannot be overstated enough. People have been building bridges for thousands of years. Software Engineering has only really been a thing for a few dozen years. We do not know what we're doing yet and it's going to be a very long time before we do.

Different domains almost definitely need different guidelines. Different ways of thinking might even need different guidelines. Anything we try to enforce now will be seen as embarrassingly dangerous in the future on the order of using radium for wrist watches.

[lisper]

> People have been building bridges for thousands of years. Software Engineering has only really been a thing for a few dozen years.

Also, the cost of building a bridge is many orders of magnitude higher than the cost of designing it. The cost of producing software, by contrast, is almost entirely the cost of designing it. This matters. Legal regimes that don't respect the laws of economics (which are, after all, just corollaries of the laws of physics) are bound to fail.

[eeZah7Ux]

> Imagine for a moment, a world in which every git commit requires a permit from the county planner.

You are making a huge strawman.