Why is it so difficult to copy source code that is not “open source”?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

Well, even at the source code step we can use a technique called “obfuscation”. Basically, it makes the code harder to understand by removing all spaces and changing variable names to meaningless ones. Then, if the code is compiled, decompiling hardly gives you more than machine code which is kinda hard to navigate through; some programs will try to recreate the source code from there but the result is far from human friendly. So, it’s never really impossible, it’s mostly very very unconvenient.

Ex, for the obfuscation thing:

showMessage(getText(‘askName’));
var name = getUserInput();
showMessage(getText(‘helloName’, name));

becomes :

`f(g(‘askName’));var a=h();f(g(‘helloName’, a));`

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