I think the general hacker culture of most programmers prevents this. There's an undercurrent of anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-management, etc... To think that the industry might choose to self enforce a license system seems very unlikely.

I've come to dislike hacker culture. Worst part is that when the hackers succeed with their objectives and take over systems; they become the authority coordinating others and they are often 10x worse than the authorities who came before them. They just focus on extracting money for themselves, pulling up the ladder behind them and building moats instead. There's nothing anti-establishment about it at the end of the day, they just join the establishment and make it much more oppressive for the next generation.

Classical example:

Bill Gates who became a billionaire out of writing software built a company that always had as a mission commoditizing software engineering work

I think another reason this hasn't happened is sheer complexity of the modern software stack. No one fully understand how everything works, in principle or in details. You can't certify someone or establish principles for things no one understands anything about.

That's just laziness. Analog systems are even messier, but they have procedures and regulations that keep the catastrophes to a minimum.

It’s because they’re a “real” professional.

Professionals (members of a profession) self-police, something software engineers don’t do.

So no one working on railroads before 1907 was a "real" professional? That's more than 100 years after the railroad was invented and took off.

The Bar exam in the US didn't start until the 1780's, so lawyers before then weren't "real" professionals either?

It's a ridiculous argument.

A better one might be that the externalities and opportunities for software engineering to kill people, or be directly tied to deaths or negative outcomes, didn't exist or weren't well enough documented until recently. As an immature field/industry that's not surprising, but it does point to a responsibility by the community to push for standards that don't currently exist.