Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjr | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com