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
This is a really great question.
You’re absolutely right that technically if the software is present on your computer you can read it and see what it does, and therefore you can modify it. You’re absolutely 100% right. It is possible to do this, it’s just hard.
Source code is like the same thing but human-readable. It has function names and variable names in English, it has comments, it’s divided up into different files that do different things.
Compiled code – the stuff that the computer actually runs – has no structure at all. It’s one gigantic string of low-level instructions with no names or comments.
Yes, you can “decompile” compiled machine code into a readable computer language. But you’ll never get the structure, organization, and text back.
With a lot of patience and cleverness, you can try to find critical pieces of the software and modify them, but it could take dozens of hours to figure out how to make a change that would take minutes if you had the actual source code.
Another crazy analogy: let’s say that you’re the conductor of a city orchestra and you want to perform the theme from Star Wars. [You could buy the sheet music for just $85 online and play it, easily.](https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/star-wars-suite-for-orchestra-deluxe-score-sheet-music/3979685)
If you wanted to transpose it into a different key, that could be a big challenge. If they gave you the sheet music electronically it could take minutes. If not it could take a music student 50 hours to recopy the sheet music while transposing it.
If you didn’t want to buy the sheet music, a good musician could listen to the recording and try to reconstruct it, but it’d be extremely time-consuming – like months of work – and the end result wouldn’t perfectly match the original in some obscure places (though it might be so close that nobody could hear the difference).
Basically, anything’s possible given enough time and effort – but many things just aren’t worth it.
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