Everything is open source if you can read assembly.
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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Sadly not, it is often considered illegal to reverse-engineer software for the purpose of circumventing DRM.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
AHA, I FOUND WHAT THIS REFERS TO WITHOUT PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND HELP FROM SEARCH ENGINES
(ok, I lied, I used DDG as a shortcut for the wikipedia page on illegal numbers)
It's only illegal if you don't abolish the state
Nothing's illegal when the cops aren't around.
Closed source is generally compiled code in an executable, so you'd have to do a lot of work de-compiling it back to the source code first.
Even at the OS level, lots of the stuff "under the hood" in Windows is obfuscated, and still the same issue, most of it is compiled code, you'd have to de-compile a significant portion of it (in an OS there's also an amount that doesn't have to be de-compiled) to be able to actually look at the code itself.
Please don't apologize for bad English, it's not against the law to have English as a second language. As a US citizen, one of the most frustrating thing is knowing brilliantly competent and capable immigrants who are ignored and passed over because their education and credentials are simply in a different language. They often come as refugees and didn't have the opportunity to get a great English education, but literally come with multiple degrees from quality universities in their home countries. Treating them like they know less because they speak a different language is so fucking absurd. Also, your English is fine, don't beat yourself up.
I would sound worse in any language I tried to speak other than English, you're doing better than I would, and better than a lot of English speakers would when put in the same situation speaking a second language they're not familiar with.
Thanks man I just sometimes make grammar mistakes and people ridicule my weird choice of words and my accent thats why I said sorry for bad English
Hey, I used to be a lot better writer, but then I got cancer and now my brain leaves out lots of words when I write or replaces words with similar words. These days I find myself constantly re-editing comments to make them make sense because the first run misses a lot. Nobody knows anyone else's story or why they might struggle with communication, and whether it's a second language or losing your faculties due to disease and age, it's not really something fair to ridicule others for. Cheers and keep up the good work, you look like you're doing fine to me.
Source code is like the recipe to create a program. Compiling the source code is like cooking or baking a recipe.
You can look at the end result and attempt to reverse engineer how it was made, and might even be able to produce a copy that is indistinguishable from the original. Without the original recipe/source code, you'll never know for sure if there is anything missing from your reproduction however.
Open source code is like a recipe that is posted freely online or otherwise openly distributed. Closed source code is like a proprietary recipe that is only known by one company/restaurant.
It means that you only have access to the compiled binaries of the program (the files on your system) and not to the source code.
Which means that you cannot see why and how the program functions the way it does. You can try and reverse engineer it or decompile it, but it will be different from the original code.
As you stated, you can't fork it either because you don't have access to the original source control.
Idk why but this close source stuff feels shady thanks for answering my question
That's how most companies operate.
In addition to the other listed reasons, going open source is an extra step.
The code has to be compiled to run on your system (if it's written in a non-interpreted language, which a huge portion of software is).
You can't just run the source code on your computer. And getting your customer's computer to compile the source code itself would require a massive amount of overhead.
So, to distribute your software, you're always almost always going to distribute an already compiled version, and you'd have to choose to give the customer the uncompiled version as just a separate thing on the side. And there's no real reason to do that for most companies.
It's interesting to have closed source for some use cases, (sensitive or top secrets programs for instance) but open source should definitely be the default rather than the exception in my opinion.
And with open source code, you have the right to copy and modify the code, and distribute your own copies of the original, or the modified code. Try that with closed source code and you'll get a nice C&D shortly.
Well, that vastly depends on the license it's under but yeah, that's the gist of it !
In addition to what others said about the availability of the source code itself, there's a whole legal framework around it.
A company could have code where the source is publicly available, but they still could say that you are not allowed to copy, fork, sell/distribute it. In that case, there wouldn't physically be anything preventing you from doing it, which sounds strange, until you think about how that's the exactly how it works for books, music, movies, etc.
There's also an in-between for software that's not publicly open source, but is open source to users. A company could sell you their software, and deliver it to you as open source code.