What is the source code for a program? And why is it kept under secret, is it always part of the production version?
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Source code is a set of instructions telling your computer how to do something. Imagine it as a recipe telling you how to bake a cake.
Now your computer doesn’t understand English, so we need to turn the recipe into machine code which your computer understands. The resulting machine code is produced using a fairly complex set of rules and it’s not easily reversible. You can’t easily get the English version of the recipe from the machine code version.
Now, in the production environment, you will always have a copy of the machine code or binary version of the program. If you had a copy of the source code you could create new versions of the machine code, which companies don’t really want you to do because they want to sell you new products. There is a movement called “open source” which advocates for giving you the source code as well, but most software isn’t released under an open source license.
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