The former cyber security advisor stated today that developers should be held accountable for security flaws in their code. It was only a matter of time before this would happen. I foresee in the next 5 years that I will have to start paying for malpractice insurance to cover the lawsuits if I get sued for bad code. It’s a good thing though. Programmers should be held responsible for bad code, but the statute of limitations should be small like 2 years. If a company hasn’t done a full code review for security in 2 years it should no longer be the programmers’ fault. Here is the link to the CNet story.

Edit - 3/20/2013 - It is now 8 years later and nothing has changed. However, I still believe that programmers should be responsible for the code they produce. Instead of government oversight though, we have Apple and Microsoft App Stores that check the quality of the code before it gets into the App stores. That’s worth 30% of my revenue I guess.