It’s been in my mind if we are using the software/program or even hardware of a tech company, we can play around, install-unsinstall and more. Then how is it so difficult for someone to “unhide” the source code that the device uses? Technically the code is in the device somewhere hidden in it, so it’s there, but still, it’s almost impossible to obtain the source code. How do they achieve this so no one copies their code?
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So, there’s a few things here.
Compiling code turns it from human readable into garbled nonsense that only computers really know what to do with. Imagine you’re reading a book, but all the spaces and vowels have been taken out.
Next, companies often obfuscate their code. While decompiling code is possible, imagine that before compilation, they replace all the “ands” with just an a, all the buts with just a b, and so on.
And then there’s the fact that you might need special software to read specific file types at all.
It’s basically impossible to make code completely impossible to read and copy and understand. However, companies can make it very hard.
If you want to see projects that pick apart hard to decompile and understand code, I would recommend taking a dive into the modding communities of games that aren’t supposed to be modded.
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