It's also part of the story how we ended up with a duopoly of airplane manufacturers.

I think there's room for regulation and forced audits. The important part is that the compliance costs are small compared to development and production costs. That's true in the car industry unless you have really low volume, while airplanes are pushed over the threshold by much lower volume and much higher regulation.

On the other hand, not everything really needs to be a free market, there are tradeoffs. It might be worth having a airplane duopoly if it ensures airlines arnt trying to buy airplanes that are shoddy with a few corners cut risks be damned (of course, if the reality is that the duopoly gets to make shoddy airplanes anyway, this doesn't apply). Some things are just very, very safety critical in a way that's more important than maximal money saved

737 Max comes to mind, when talking about safety.

Boeing took engineering shortcuts of using software to make the plane appear to fly like older 737s to avoid a new type certification and the necessary retraining costs. I think FAA failed here by continuing to allow that to fly without a new type certification.

Cars are a bit different, considering they are physical objects that can easily kill people and you can't exactly manufacture a car in your room with a $50 computer - entry prices are a tiny bit higher there.

Meanwhile, i don't think i should have to ask permission from the government to make something like, e.g. a map editing tool for a 90s fps, like i did yesterday[0] (the tool, not requesting permission) or a sprite editor[1] or a quick-and-dirty wiki server to take notes in games[2]. Or really anything that doesn't have to do with areas where lives are at stake (which AFAIK is already being done anyway with programs needing to pass conformance tests - something i'm perfectly fine with, at least in theory, as i don't know in practice if these tests really work or are designed to help existing actors stay entrenched).

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/chasmfe/

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/mseditor/

[2] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/cppwiki/

What about megacorps writing operating systems for 99% of the device-owner population of the world?

And again, the original comment above is not "ask permission from the government" but instead "pass independent security audits by neutral auditors before exposing your software to the general public."

It was

> independent security audits paid with public money

The "with public money" part means they are funded and thus controlled by the government.

Not that i think a privately owned megacorp is much better, after all i do not like the scare boxes you see on unsigned (and "lesser signed") programs in Windows and macOS unless you pay the certificate mafia protection money - but at least those do not block you completely.