Greetings.
Ever since I heard about open-source source software, I had a question as to how can a piece of software remain completely discreet in its internal functioning even while being present on a computer?
In simple words, all the files of the software are present on the computer, so why can’t the source-code of it be *extracted* in some way?
If that is not possible, then how come crackers/patchers *crack* a software to function without a license? (Because I reckon they would need access to the code in order to modify its functioning.)
Thanks in advance.
In: Technology
Source code is important because it’s written by humans, for humans to read. There is 70 years of best practices and standards and such that have been developed to make complex programs as easy to read and understand their functionality as possible, for humans.
When you compile source code into an executable, generally you expect all that loving craft and attempts to give pleasant experience get all discarded. Computer does not want to understand any bit of the code, it just wants to know what instruction to run next.
There are some un-compilers that try to reverse this process, using knowledge of what sorta common structures usually result in what kinda executable, but there are still things like names that are irreversibly lost, and it’s still only an approximation.
So yeah, it’s possible to reverse-engineer things, but it’s presenting all kinds of frustrating additional difficulties and ultimately require you to kinda re-build the software yourself.
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