I don’t know (but wanna learn) programming, but, for example, can’t you inspect the code of an app if it’s installed?

(yeah this is kind of a stupid question.)

EDIT: Thanks for the clarification, guys!

  • amio
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    fedilink
    1411 months ago

    No, for several reasons. First off, open source is open source (code), as opposed to peeking at the compiled machine code/bytecode/whatever, or actively reverse engineering it. At that point it’s no longer the source. Depending on tech and compilers, code could be very hard to read once compiled. In many cases, any descriptive names and comments are history. Some people try to make it actively harder to figure out (obfuscation, DRM) on top of that.

    After that, a lot of the principial difference comes from licensing and such, “open source” is usually differentiated from “source available” but where you can’t really “legally” do anything with it other than look.