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Comment by tjr | Hacker News Reader

What if you wanted your wooden table to be two inches shorter? Should you be both technologically and legally prevented from sawing two inches off each of the legs?

What if you wanted to build your own wooden table? Maybe you don't need the original schematics, but should you be both technologically and legally prevented from examining your own table to learn how it was constructed?

What if (for whatever perverse reason) your wooden table did in fact come pre-installed with a miniature surveillance camera that sent footage of you back to the manufacturer. Should you be both technologically and legally prevented from removing such a device from your table?

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Your arguments are all against reverse-engineering/code modification being illegal - which I think most people would agree on - not on free software.

Allowing reverse engineering is a matter of allowing people freedom.

Trying to force people to provide source code for everything is the opposite.

I thought this was a discussion about "free software" in the context of how FSF/GNU defines "free software":

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Access to the source code is not a precondition to understanding how software works. It certainly helps, but it's not a requirement.

If anyone believes that, they're effectively saying that it is absolutely impossible for a human to program in machine code. Which is obviously false.

Sure, you can reverse engineer a piece of software. But that's working around an obstacle. The point of free software is that there are no obstacles which would impair your ability to inspect, modify and change it in any way you see fit.

Also, I believe that most EULAs for non-free software have clauses which specifically forbid any attempt to reverse engineer it. I could be wrong, of course, but I doubt it.

You miss the point of what software freedom is supposed to be about -- it is supposed to give everyone the same ability to understand and modify the software that the original author has. The source code is almost always the most convenient and preferred form of software for authors to read and edit, so it follows that to have the same freedom they do, you should be able to read and edit the source code.

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