talcite
April 29th, 2007, 07:13 AM
I guess this is kind of embarassing since I'm going into a Comp Sci major and I should know this but... why don't we have more reverse engineering projects going on?
As an open source community, the single biggest advantage that we have is that we can share and collaborate much better than closed source projects. If we had more reverse engineering projects, not only would closed source projects lose their appeal (why develop closed if people are going to reverse engineer it?) but we would also have many more powerful applications. The best examples I can think of are the illustrator/photoshop kit and perhaps the CAD environment and, of course, graphics drivers. Of course, the biggest advantage to this is that more people would come over the linux because the apps would be available for all the OSes.
Photoshop is widely viewed as more powerful than GIMP or any other image editor out there, but it has alot of bloatware. We really don't have autoCAD or solidworks on linux, ProE is available, but I don't believe that it is open source. Finally, the Nvidia and ATI drivers drive me insane and many others can probably attest to that as well. Is there some site like launchpad atleast that people can come together and work on reverse engineering applications and drivers?
(Yes, I realize that application reverse engineering is a whole different ballgame when compared to driver reverse engineering.)
As an open source community, the single biggest advantage that we have is that we can share and collaborate much better than closed source projects. If we had more reverse engineering projects, not only would closed source projects lose their appeal (why develop closed if people are going to reverse engineer it?) but we would also have many more powerful applications. The best examples I can think of are the illustrator/photoshop kit and perhaps the CAD environment and, of course, graphics drivers. Of course, the biggest advantage to this is that more people would come over the linux because the apps would be available for all the OSes.
Photoshop is widely viewed as more powerful than GIMP or any other image editor out there, but it has alot of bloatware. We really don't have autoCAD or solidworks on linux, ProE is available, but I don't believe that it is open source. Finally, the Nvidia and ATI drivers drive me insane and many others can probably attest to that as well. Is there some site like launchpad atleast that people can come together and work on reverse engineering applications and drivers?
(Yes, I realize that application reverse engineering is a whole different ballgame when compared to driver reverse engineering.)