Free?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:51:11 -0400, Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Am 26.10.2011 23:38, schrieb Steven Schveighoffer:
>>
>> But it's much harder to reverse engineer how someone built a machine
>> than it is to reverse engineer how software is built.
>
> Really?
> I guess it depends on the machine but I imagine it isn't so hard to  
> dismantle a machine to find out how it works? (But I have no experience  
> with that,  it's just a guess)
> Reverse Engineering software can be pretty hard if the author made it  
> deliberately hard, like Skype.

If you have no idea how a material is built, such as a new kind of glass,  
you have to guess.  There are often few clues left behind of how to build  
a physical machine.  This is not the same for software, which can always  
be disassembled.

-Steve