Glass Panel Longevity

On Sat, 21 Oct 2006 09:26:37 +0200, Mxsmanic
wrote:

Sylvain writes:

you just made it clear that you do not understand how open
source development works.

I understand exactly how it works, and so does the market, which is
why safety-of-life software (and much other mission-critical software)
tends to be proprietary.

I know I shouldn't do this but... proprietary and safety-of-life
software are linked not because of safety but because of "for profit".
IE they are proprietary because they do not want others to know how
they are doing what they are doing.
Open source would mean providing the source code and they don't want
that. Hence the de compiling and reverse engineering clauses in the
license as well

The only thing difficult about de compiling or disassembling is the
size of the current state and next state arrays for today's
processors. In the days of the 6502 and straight C they were small,
compact, fast, and easy to write.
In the case of compilers and de compilers you only need to change the
two arrays to change languages or processors. Today the arrays for an
assembler/disassemble are huge. What's the size of the instruction set
for a late model Athlon or Pentium? The set for a 6502 or Z80 would
fit onto 4 sheets the size of a bingo card and by chance were referred
to as bingo cards.

Any good software engineer could write a disassembler and decompiler
to turn that proprietary software into readable code, (there's a bit
more to it that but I'll leave it there) BUT who'd want to. You'd then
have to sift through many thousands of lines of code. Any company that
did that would need a team to do the sifting and the feds tend to
frown on the whole process.

In my undergrad work I had to write a compiler in one term. In
graduate school the same class with the same book (different
university) was split between two terms (one of which was 500 level)
and was 8 credit hours instead of 4. They wouldn't let me take it
again :-))
Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com