Software technoapocalypse: AI can now convert executables to source code, so secrecy is gone. By Eric S. Raymond.
The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.
In this example, Eric recovered the source code (what humans write, with language words and comments) from the binary (the program file your computer runs, just 0’s and 1’s for your processor). This was impossible until very recently.
I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal [a computer language popular in the 1990s] from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust [the emerging systems programming language, the successor to the C language] and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.
The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn’t have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.
A revolution in the economics and use of software is arriving:
This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.
I say “almost” because there is going to be one way to maintain secrecy. Software as a service with the executable hiding behind a network connection to the cloud. But as of now, we must assume that anything shipped as an executable, or even a firmware image, is as transparent as glass. It won’t keep its secrets for any longer than it takes for somebody to be motivated to throw an LLM at it.
I did not see this coming. When I wrote down the theory of open source, 30 years ago now, I thought closed source would be gradually driven towards extinction by cost gradients, but survive indefinitely in certain niches. I did not foresee it being wiped out in a technoapocalypse. …
Legal impediments? Not really:
There are still some obstacles. In US law, decompilation of a binary is a derivative work of the binary that falls under whatever copyright it had. However, it is also settled law that if you decompile binary code to a precise specification of what it does, then generate fresh code from that without looking at the decompiled stuff, you’re in the clear. This was the case law that allowed PC clones to exist, after Phoenix Technologies reverse engineered the original IBM PC BIOS.
The two-step process — binary to specification to unencumbered code — will no longer takes a large number of programmers and years of development time. With an LLM, it’s now a thing you can do in a day. Ubiquity will make it impractical to prosecute all the people who might skip the specification step.
Wiggling already:
Forced migration from shipped binaries to tied cloud services [where the actual computation is run on the software company’s servers, not on your computer] will be tried — Adobe pioneered this, and Microsoft is pushing it as hard as they can given that their OS is a binary that has to run locally. Both companies are seeing massive user revolts over this. There is good reason to doubt that it’s a strategy that can hold customers in the long term.
Also, a lot of things can’t safely be tied to the cloud at all, because they can’t tolerate a random network outage. Machine tools, medical devices…
Technoapocalypse:
A whole lot of proprietary software business models are going to collapse. Hard. One that I think might survive is tax software; being able to decompile it doesn’t necessarily do you a lot of good because its actual value is tracking a ruleset that changes over time and has to be maintained by vendor specialists. But cases like this are unusual. …
We’re entering a new world, with a lot of ancient comfortable assumptions being blown up. It’s going to be fun to watch.
Microsoft Office has just been decoded. By Jhet Borja, at Tom’s Hardware.
Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude.
Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.
Brandon Thomas isn’t just trying to provide compatible replacements for these tools. He’s attempting to break the entire enshittified business model that produced them.