Quote of the day from software pioneer Eric S. Raymond: ‘The end of software secrecy is almost here’ – declares victory for the open source movement
Eric Steven Raymond, widely known as ‘ESR’, has been a major presence in the software development space for many decades, making key contributions to the development school, programming languages, and the open source movement. Given the rise of AI, ESR has marked the end of the closed source software development model.
“The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source and the final triumph of open source.”
Reverse engineering
ESR issued this verdict on X recently, adding to its recent history of comments on the rise of large language models (LLMs) and the impact on software.
quote of the day
This article is part of TechRadar Pro’s QOTD project to provide insights into the minds of the tech industry’s brightest and most recognizable figures today and in years past. Read the entire series here.
In his post, the software pioneer discussed how a fun experiment involving using AI to decompile an old game and port it to a new format alerted him to the possibility of this practice being carried out on a much larger scale.
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“The thing is, I thought of this as a fun hack, but I had no confidence that the technique would scale to real, large programs,” he wrote, adding, “I’ve since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with full AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.”
A paradigm shift
The implication of this practice, ESR said, is that there is no longer a moat of secrecy around almost any software, and that the only way for the industry to maintain this “moat” is by hiding its executables behind SaaS shields. In that sense, cloud-enabled software will be much more difficult to open and reverse engineer.
Instead of closed source being gradually driven toward extinction by cost gradients, as he envisioned, he now believes that closed source software can be “wiped out in a techno-apocalypse,” albeit with the caveat that some laws will prevent mass decompilation of binaries.
His thoughts echo the views of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who put a spin on Marc Andreessen’s famous comment that “software is eating the world” by suggesting in 2017 that “AI is going to eat software.” This is arguably something we are seeing as AI improves and becomes more prevalent across the enterprise.
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