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?
In: 366
An analogy can be made with, say, a movie. The difference between final product and source code is like the difference between having:
(A) – A warehouse room full of props and costumes used, catalogued as to what was used in which scene – The raw footage of the many takes of scenes from different camera angles, only a fraction of which made the final edit – A box full of copies of the script, some with stage directions written in them, some with camera directions written in them, some with lighting directions written in them, etc.
versus
(B) A 90 minute video file.
If you just want to watch a movie, you only need (B). But if you want to *create* a movie that is a slightly altered version of (B), then having all that stuff in (A) is needed or else you’re totally starting from scratch.
It’s a one-way process going from A to B because there are multiple different hypothetical (A)’s that could have given the same resulting (B). So if all you have is (B) you can’t use it to generate the exact (A) it came from. (You can *guess*, and generate one *possible* (A) it might have come from, and there are programs that do that called “de-compilers” but the result is horrible to read and very hard to work with.)
Latest Answers