Isn decompilation illegal, or at least immoral?
This is a big issue. Certainly, decompiling commercial code for other than a few purposes (interoperability, checking for malware, etc) is illegal. The legal situation may have changed in the USA with the Digital Millenium Act, and similar acts in countries that follow the US lead in this. However, there are plenty of legal uses. The three main ones are: • the recovery of lost source code (some estimates put all lost source code world wide at 5%). • reengineering of legacy code (where the old code is in a language that is no longer supported on modern architectures, for example). Where there is some source code, source to source translation would almost certainly be preferable. • Checking for malware (viruses, back doors, etc). In this case, it’s used as a glorified disassembler, but the effort of looking through 100 lines of C is presumably less than looking through 500 lines of assembler. Plus, the checker doesn’t have to be aware of the details of the source machine. I leave the iss
