Free?

[Chante]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> 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.
>

That just gets you the assembly code. There are many high-level concepts 
that are missing from that. But that's not even that important. The 
software didn't just get specified on it's own. Someone had to think of 
it. Reverse-engineering, then, really isn't. It's just taking stabs at 
it. Dissassembly does not achieve figuring out how the software was 
engineered, how it came to be, and other things.