Software engineers are personally liable for their work. It's just that it's much more difficult to prove the various elements of negligence in the software rea

Software engineers are personally liable for their work. It's just that it's much more difficult to prove the various elements of negligence in the software realm, which makes litigation costly and uncertain. How negligent is an arithmetic overflow in a free software library that causes the loss of # of ads clicked for 10,000 Facebook users? Could the developer have foreseen the use case? What's the value of that loss? An arithmetic bug in a flight safety system or financial trading platform? Your odds of being successfully sued just went up astronomically as it's much easier to show negligence and put a dollar figure to damages. Professional licensing regimes are principally designed to prevent negligence by a priori preventing people from holding themselves out as capable of performing some task. In terms of legal liability all they really do is restrict the extent to which you can limit your liability contractually. That's important in business and in professional services (doctor, lawyer, etc), but for downstream users who suffer damages there was never a contract involved, anyhow.