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1. Embed this notice
   翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 27-Feb-2025 19:12:04 JST 翠星石

   in reply to

   • Blender Dumbass ( J.Y.Amihud )
   • LisPi
   @lispi314 @blenderdumbass Decompiling proprietary software doesn't liberate it, as even without the DMCA, the result is still proprietary and is not the original source code.
   
   There's nothing illegal about decompiling a binary to reverse engineer it, although the same person who decompiles it can only document the datastructures etc and not write the replacement program (which is a problem as usually only one person is interested in writing a replacement).
   
   Under the DMCA, writing a replacement program may be illegal though.
   • Embed this notice
     LisPi (lispi314@udongein.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 27-Feb-2025 19:12:05 JST LisPi

     • Blender Dumbass ( J.Y.Amihud )
     @blenderdumbass > In a way, it seems like the corporations are literally defeating us. They made it so hard for us to fight their nonsense, so hard to reverse engineer their hardware, that most of us gave up. Sitting on 15 - 20 year old machines and pretending to be okay with it. (https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/the_incels_of_computing:_the_depressive_defense_mechanisms_of_free_software)
     
     I think the role that the DMCA and similar bad laws have had in this matter should not be underestimated (https://pluralistic.net/tag/dmca/).
     
     Requiring blackbox reverse-engineering to avoid legal trouble (such as technical felony acts) is *not* a reasonable hurdle and it's why it is so hard to reach feature parity with things that are readily available on Windows.
     
     If those laws were abolished, a lot of things would suddenly become *much* easier to reverse-engineer, because one wouldn't have to shy away from simply decompiling proprietary software to liberate it.