Re: Reverse engineering != piracy (was Re: RosAsm disassembler output vs. IDA Pro)

From: Gerhard W. Gruber (sparhawk_at_gmx.at)
Date: 01/25/04 

Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2004 11:17:09 +0100

On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 21:15:31 GMT wrote "Randall Hyde"
<randyhyde@earthlink.net> in alt.lang.asm with
<TfBQb.25146$1e.1561@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>

>Rene has specifically stated that the purpose of the disassembler is to lift
>code out of other programs for use with RosAsm applications. Sometimes

Yes, he did that. But it doesn't follow that he meant to steal code from
programs where it is not allowed. I never read such a claim from him, also nit
implicitly. I always understood that the disassembler is a tool for reusing
your existing code or library code, which you would reuse anyway.

I don't think that this is a good idea, but then again. That approach would be
VERY hard to apply to some commercial app anyway, as it takes quite a lot of
time to "reuse" a nice function from i.E. MS Word. I doubt that anybody, who
is in his right mind, will reverse engineer Word jsut to get a function out of
it. The amount of work involved is in no relation to the benefit you gain, so
this already makes the disassembling approach only usefull, as a tool for
reusing code, for apps where you already know the code quite well, which
limits it to your own code mostly.

>is, if the disassembler gets used the way Rene claims that it will, piracy
>will wind up being involved.

I strongly doubt this. IDA Pro is quite good for reverse engineering and I
doubt that Renes disassembler will ever become so good, as this is also a
question of time and resources. Pressing two buttons and having a resuable
code will only be possible for a SEVERLY limited number of apps.

Considering the time and resources the IDA Pro guys already spent on it, I
don't really think that Rene will come up with anything just as usefull or
even surpassing it. 

-- 
Gerhard Gruber
Maintainer of
SoftICE for Linux - http://pice.sourceforge.net/
Fast application launcher - http://sourceforge.net/projects/launchmenu

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