BBC News commentator Bill Thompson has written a great article about software liability. Having worked at a transport/traffic software company during the first 2 years of my working life where a mistake by the programmers or QA can potentially results in fatality, I agree with Bill Thompson.
Yes, software will cost more to develop and test* but the reduction of support and bug fixing will offset the initial cost somewhat. More importantly, I want software that works most of the time, if not always. Not software that works the majority of the time if I am lucky.
* We had to proof (or able to provide proof) that our testings exercise every line and branch of our software. Thus we spent extraordinary amount of time generating contrived scenarios in order to exercise some obscure error conditions.
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