[pp.int.general] Why Free Software misses the point

[Owen Kahn]

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Fedor Khod'kov <fedor76 at istra.ru> wrote:

> Radosław Nadstawny <radoslaw.nadstawny at o2.pl> writes:
> > I'd disagree. Terms like "human readable" and "machine readable" are
> > inventions of lawyers and have little or no true meaning. Every program
> > can be read and understood by human even in it's binary form. It just
> > requires some skills. Sure, binary form is harder to comprehend than
> > source code, but not impossible. Saying that computer program in binary
> > form is not human readable is like saying that books in Chinese are not
> > human readable, and because of this you can't compare them to books in
> > English.
>
> There are learning courses in Chinese; there are also translators who
> can translate a book from Chinese to English or any other language;
> probably, in the future software translators will be able to produce
> adequate translations from Chinese automatically.  So, books in Chinese
> are human-readable.
>
> On the contrary, there are no learning courses on reading binary form of
> software and no translators (either specially trained human or special
> software) exist.  Reverse-engineering is not routine activity.  That
> means software in binary form isn't human-readable.

Decompilers <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompiler> exist, as well as at
least one textbook<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversing:_Secrets_of_Reverse_Engineering>
on
reverse engineering.

>

--
> Fedor.
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