Re (2): [Ilugc] Microsoft and Macromedia...(New bedpartners?)
- From: ksriram@xxxxxxx (Sriram Krishnan)
- Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 01:40:58 +0530
A majority of the development of open source w.r.t. to interoperability
is the splendid work of reverse engineering. One example is
writing device drivers for various external products. The programmers
only know the brand name, model and chipset. It is the work of
reverse engineering that tells us about the protocols used by the
devices to interact with the systems.
Actually, I'm really bad at hardware so hats off to these guys. I'm
really in awe of someone who can reverse engineer this stuff and write
device drivers. I think it'll be sometime before all manufacturers open
up to the idea of supporting Linux..especially, as a lot of them are
still queasy about making their device drivers open source. However,
people like Nvidia and Ati are pretty good in this regard.
Were the numerous bugs in windoze found (which
continue to exist and are being found) by seeing the
source code? or knowing the internals? No. It was all
simple reverse engineering :)
Actually, that's the same technique a lot of people use, irrespective of
whether they have access to source.If you're good at assembly, you can
do wonders with software like SoftICE. So, in a way, you do have the
code.
BTW, its Windows and not 'Windoze'. You know, the OS which had less CERT
security alerts than other..ahem...operating systems. :-)
Sriram
---------------------------------------------------
I blog at
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-----Original Message-----
From: ilugc-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [
mailto:ilugc-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Shaks
Sent: 14 April 2004 20:40
To: ilugc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re (2): [Ilugc] Microsoft and Macromedia...(New bedpartners?)
Hi!
A majority of the development of open source w.r.t. to interoperability
is the splendid work of reverse engineering. One example is writing
device drivers for various external products. The programmers only know
the brand name, model and chipset. It is the work of reverse engineering
that tells us about the protocols used by the devices to interact with
the systems.
Were the numerous bugs in windoze found (which
continue to exist and are being found) by seeing the
source code? or knowing the internals? No. It was all
simple reverse engineering :)
Shaks
--- rajendran <rajendran@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear Shaks,
I don't think you can speak thus, on behalf of the
open source community.
Friends or foes, it is important to know what is
happening next door.
Particularly, when we are talking about a standard
for small-foot-print but
visually-rich web-based applications.
About your boast that there is always flash support
for Linux, just imagine
what might happen if Micro buys Macro and closes the file-structure of
the next-gen Flash? :-(
Rajendran.
=====
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--
"RIT...Rockz in IT"
"So, what if the ball is in the opponent's court, you got balls too!" "I
strive to be in the top 1%.......
.......among the top 1%"
- Shaks
http://www.rit.edu/~sak5991
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