Decompilation Makes .NET Applications Open Source
This is a common claim, and completely preposterous. Even if you could decompile to the absolute original source, including comments, local variable names etc, that wouldn’t make the application Open Source Software. The Open Source movement is about software licences – what you have the legal right to do. If the author of the software doesn’t let you have the source without reverse engineering it, that isn’t Open Source Software. (There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s enough to show the absurdity of the myth.)
How Severe Is The Problem?
Many developers have been shocked by how easy it is to decompile their code, and fear that it means they no longer have any way of protecting their intellectual property. In practice, I don’t believe the problem is nearly as big as it’s claimed to be. Firstly, intellectual property is almost always within the design of a system, not in the individual bits of implementation. If you design a world-beating application, chances are that the reason it’s world-beating will be obvious to anyone who uses it anyway. Only a very few areas in computing are really all about which algorithms are used, and how they’re implemented – areas such as sound and video compression.
Have you ever tried to read a large amount of code without any documentation, comments or meaningful local variable names? In my experience, it can be hard enough to understand code when you do have design documents and comments, let alone without it. Now, let’s make it even harder