Yeah, all software will be open source software real soon, whether their owners like it or not.
- reverse-engineered a Mac AppStore menubar ppp (using Ghidra), modernized its UI, and added support for Apple Silicon. It took about 90 minutes running in the background.
- created faithful macOS ports of ~7 classic 68k Macintosh games via 68k disasm tools Claude wrote for itself; most are now written in Swift, with MacToolbox routines reimplemented (one exception: MS Flight Simulator 1.02 worked better as a plain C and SDL2 app, since it has a hand-authored bytecode interpreter in 68k assembly and draws the entire UI itself)
All it takes is a goal with nearly 100% specificity
At some point, boycott will be consumers' only viable move. Legislation is urgently needed here imo.
Online purchases in some fashion are delivered to you and put on your hard disk. You can in theory preserve the game or reverse engineer it when its constituent parts have to be delivered to you.
Online-only DRM is bad yeah, but with sufficient effort it can be sidestepped : see the unofficial WoW servers.
Meanwhile game streaming is extremely resource heavy, needs rock solid Internet connections, and runs into laws of physics for latency issues. But more games will probably go this route, yeah, especially those targeting players of specific (high) wealth brackets. (Boycott them, just like other online-only DRM.)
Multiplayer will still have a moat, but even that is in trouble as cheats will be created by hundreds of thousands of players using AI
Not all software, obviously. Apple is notoriously good at producing "black box" products.
Runtime modification and replacement is limited by hardware root of trust, but for sheer source inspection I don’t think they’re special. What products are you thinking about?
Reverse engineering means taking the finished product apart to understand how it works. For software, that means getting back to a source code that could be compiled, so you have the architecture and constants and API calls and all that.
On PS5 it's done in couple of seconds.