In software, if I build a toy, and release it to the world, many people may find it useful. They might trust it with their most personal data, or vital business documents. But, it is still a toy.

If I build a toy bridge no-one tries to make it span the grand canyon. They see it for what it is - its faults are obvious. They try to cross my toy bridge and it easily collapses under the weight of their foot without costing the lives of anyone. And, if they somehow managed to string along my toy to the point where it could span the grand canyon, do you think anyone in their right mind would find me liable as the toy maker?

Ultimately, this is where the differences are huge. People are building toy bridges, pet bridges, foot bridges, bridges for single cars and bridges for 10 lanes of traffic. It's very difficult to accidentally substitute a bridge built for 1 person into a spot you need a bridge for 10 lanes of traffic.

But it's trivial in software to put a "toy bridge" or "pet bridge" where you need something like the golden gate bridge.

So, when someone takes my toy and tries to use it as the golden gate bridge, whose at fault?

With a bunch of random people just making a bridge that collapses, then unless it's on their own property, they know that other people will use it and expect it to not collapse and so liability is justified there. (If it's on their own property, then morally there shouldn't be any liability unless they invited someone to use it, but legally is another matter.)

If this was ANY product other than software, there wouldn't even be a question of Valve being liable, and that's just disgusting to me.

I think the problem is EULAs. Foss Eula's are pretty straight forward - no warranty: use at your own risk. Corporate software takes the same approach, and I think that's cowardly and underhanded because they are a profit driven entity which, if not incentivized properly, would literally rob you blind.

Corporations are profit driven. No profit, no corporation.

If your going to profit off of selling me something which then burns my house down because it was cheaper for the vendor to not build to standards (best practices), shouldn't they be held liable?

If someone made a lamp for themselves that wasn't up to standard, and then left it out on the curb for garbage pickup when you came along and took it home, plugged it in, and burned down your house, who's fault is that? They didn't sell it to you. There was no purchase.

By a lot.

No one sane would put a pet project out in the open, and we'd all have far fewer kernels from which great things could grow.

(Unless you're specifically talking about closed-source software, in which case I just might largely agree with you.)

Yeah, we've all noticed the rampant mass deaths of millions because of software issues...

/sarcasm