eli5 How exactly is the source code of an app/software being “locked”? What is protecting it from being seen?
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It’s sort of like the difference between a labelled blueprint/instructions on how to build a circuit board, and just looking at a circuit board itself.
Looking at the blueprint you’d see a lot of words and phrases clearly describing how things work and what does what, but once that’s turned into the final board it’s just a bunch of unlabeled chips and abbreviations.
Source code is like the blueprint. It’s labelled with human readable words and designed to be easy to read, but in order for that computer to actually run it it needs to be converted to 1s and 0s that the computer can read. All words are replaced with numbers, the entire structure gets re-arranged, and it becomes really difficult to work backwards and figure out what every thing is supposed to do, sort of like that one Pixar animation with the alien learning to fly the ship https://youtu.be/LVLoc6FrLi0
Not to say it doesn’t happen. Dedicated fans reverse engineer games from the compiled binaries pretty frequently. One I’m currently following is called “Metaforce,” which is a reverse engineering of Metroid Prime and it’s super interesting seeing how it’s done on the live streams.
Let me try a comparison.
The runnable application is like a PDF that you can print. The source code would be the Excel sheet from which the PDF is produced.
If you want to make serious changes to the PDF, you need the initial spreadsheet, and you cannot realistically infer it from the PDF.
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